...a new, necessary and brilliant book ... Monroe treats each individual narrative with nuance, empathy and transparency, allowing both the protagonists and their supporting cast to remain complex. She delves into the social and political ramifications of each narrative, making accessible and visible what so often gets overlooked in these stories because it's too complicated to put into a headline or summary. Monroe's book is a pleasure to read because it is smart, well-researched and well-written — beautifully, really ... But more than that, Savage Appetites is important because it refuses to sit inside binaries of good vs. evil, victim vs. perpetrator, innocent victim vs. mastermind criminal. It doesn't give us easy answers for why women are the main consumers of true crime narratives, because there aren't any because women as a category are not monolith and because it's complicated and nuanced and different for everyone. The book is important also because I suspect there are more than a few of us who, like Monroe herself, feel conflicted about their desire to consume stories of murder and mayhem and wonder what it reflects about the world around us and ourselves.
...[an] enthralling book ... worth consuming in one sitting ... Monroe zeroes in on the aftermath of murder, on the morbid curiosity that draws eager civilians toward the crime scene and catapults them into starring roles. She avoids the formulaic professional tropes of true crime ... It might seem like a mistake, in the book’s 'Victim' section, to focus on a crime as familiar as the murder of Sharon Tate, but Monroe has a knack for nosing a new story out of an old one, like a detective casting fresh eyes on a cold case ... Monroe’s only real misfire in Savage Appetites is the personal history she scatters through the book...The crescendo in each section is tempered by these vignettes, like a death knell muted by a leather baffle. To interrupt her narrative to describe her Googling a random murder in her hometown is akin to a friend pausing Law & Order to tell you about the time someone she never met was murdered hundreds of miles away ... By the end of the book, I found myself almost admiring the emotional plasticity of women who consciously scramble the logic of the predator-prey relationship in order to escape their unsatisfying lives.
By looking at women looking at violence, Monroe doesn’t quite answer the question of why women love true crime — as she points out, women are a diverse group with a wide variety of motivations. Instead, she ends up with something subtler and more useful, a call to action for crime-heads to consume the stories they want, but to do so critically ... Monroe is a perceptive narrator, and I sometimes wished for more of her personal story, which produces many of the book’s best insights but often peters out inconclusively ... Monroe connects the appeal of true-crime stories, which run 'on an engine of empathy,' with the persuasive power of the victims rights movement, which encouraged onlookers to put themselves in a murdered girl’s place ... Most valuable is the moral nuance that Monroe brings to a genre that inspires fierce fandoms and disgusted dismissals but not enough scrutiny in between. She writes with clarity about the ways true crime distorts our vision ... I’m bound to think of Savage Appetites often, and soon.
Monroe’s writing is superb and each woman’s story is fascinating even if, as a whole, the book lacks a cohesive narrative thread. Regardless, true crime aficionados will appreciate this spin on the genre.
Monroe chronicles her lifelong obsession with crime...without letting herself off the hook. Her book serves, in part, as a reminder that – as trendy as crime narratives have become, as much as the storytelling has evolved – there is still something sordid about consuming human tragedies ... Part of what I liked about this book is that Monroe resists the need to sweep all of her material into a single, tidy narrative. Her prose – consistently lyrical and probing – does a lot of the work towards making it feel cohesive. All four stories are fascinating ... In allowing for messiness – narrative as well as moral – her book is a corrective to the genre it interrogates.
Monroe’s ostensible aim is to unpack women’s peculiar relationship to, and fascination with, true crime. Yet the scope of Savage Appetites is actually much more wide-ranging ... Savage Appetites becomes, in its own way, a neat piece of detective work: Monroe unearths what has to be buried in American crime storytelling in order to produce tales that are easy to consume and guaranteed to turn a profit, both economic and emotional ... Monroe’s deeper gift is teasing out how these personal tales of obsession and grief intersect with, and are fueled by, larger cultural narratives ... Monroe’s analysis is always nuanced, never polemical. She is far from castigating the victims’ rights movement and its founders, including Doris Tate. On the contrary, she portrays them with deep empathy ... Monroe does not exempt herself from the seductive lure of the dead white girl trope either. Popular crime narratives, in order to gain their hypnotic force, exploit their audience’s blind spots. In Savage Appetites, Monroe has her eyes wide open.
Each story receives intelligent context ... Savage Appetites is a chilling, compelling examination of the darkness in us all. This is obviously a book for true-crime fans, as well as anyone interested in human nature ... A powerful, well-researched inquiry into why we find violent crime so fascinating, viewed though the stories of detective, victim, defender and killer.
This provocative work is best suited to readers with a strong interest in true crime and its historical roots. Though lacking the rigor and documentation of an academic work, it manages to create an original and bold contribution to the genre.
The author is far from a judgmental outsider. She doesn't attempt to pretend she's peering into the fishbowl: she's a crime junkie herself and, like many others, can't help but wonder if society is correct in thinking that ladies like herself, who find themselves absorbed by such dark material, must have something deeply corrupted inside. Interspersed throughout the book's compelling true stories are our author's descriptions of her own history with the genre and her connections to the same archetypes she's outlining. It allows a steadfast vein of relatability to run through the entire work ... thoroughly entertains. Monroe is the perfect guide through these well-researched stories, using personal experiences, psychological insights, and historical context to direct us. True crime fans, guilty pleasure and unapologetic readers alike will want to dive into this book to try to determine what inspires their own love of the genre. In an enormously satisfying way, this book has just the right recipe to become the crime fanatic's newest obsession.
... probing, recursive ... A magazine writer known for her laser-cut dissections of cresting cultural phenomena, Monroe brings a rare form of joy to her reporting: Her best pieces combine a focused effort to nail down a good story and a more expansive instinct toward unraveling, questioning, showing her work. Writing about social-media hucksters, dating-app con men, and new-old wellness elixirs, she exhibits a gift—perhaps prized even more by editors than it is among journalists—for the precise interval at which a sort-of thing is ready to become a full-on thing, to be caught mid-microcurrent, skillfully examined, and released into the slightly wider waterways that now pass for the mainstream ... The chapters are discrete, linked chiefly by their interest in the context Monroe expands by a sort of narrative stealth, broadening with each stroke our sense of the world within which women in particular might seek not just entertainment or relief but purpose in a carefully wrought proximity to crime ... Monroe’s lithe critical intelligence is the chief binding agent of chapters that wander and digress.
Women like true crime because women are natural outsiders, [Monroe] suggests, and this observation might have transformed from platitude to insight had Monroe committed to a deeper excavation of each of her four subjects’ social and psychological states. What, in other words, made Lorri Davis want to defend a man widely believed at the time to have murdered three children? Instead, Savage Appetites unravels as Monroe flits between perspectives, not staying in one mind long enough to make us understand its motivations. The victims of the crimes she describes...get especially short shrift.
... an engrossing look at a counterintuitive yet well-established phenomenon ... Writing in incisive, lyrical prose, Monroe takes a deep dive into possible reasons why women are drawn to tales of violence ... as Monroe bravely and refreshingly acknowledges, maybe women respond to tales of human darkness because it mirrors their own ... Readers who have pondered their own interest in true crime stories will welcome Monroe’s incisive approach to the topic.
Monroe ably dissects the hidden bias within notions of 'victim' and 'perpetrator,' looking at such issues as the implicit racism of the criminal justice system and the so-called 'war on drugs.' She stumbles somewhat in blending these insights smoothly with the biographical information ... This is a book sure to please fans of mystery and true crime. An insightful invitation to consider the contexts and causes of a gritty cultural obsession.