Book Review: "The Best New True Crime Stories: Small Towns" edited by Mitzi Szereto (2020)
About halfway through reading The Best New True Crime Stories: Small Towns, I realized a funny thing- I’m not a big true crime junkie. Looking at the bookshelves in my room, there’s nary a true crime book to be found. There’s plenty of horrific stuff, to be sure, but I don’t gravitate towards the true crime genre. And yet Mitzi Szereto’s The Best New True Crime Stories series is now a requirement in my life. That’s just how it works sometimes; a testament to the combination of talented writing, thorough research, and a social conscience.
I don’t know if this is how a lot of the other true crime books are, but they damn well should be. When you can hook someone who’s not even into your genre, you must be doing something right. This is my third Mitzi Szereto book now (Ladies of Gothic Horror: A Collection of Classic Stories, The Best New True Crime Stories: Serial Killers), and I’m frankly waiting for the other shoe to drop.
This time around, Mitzi (who again contributes a piece) and Company are taking you to the small towns of the world- those idyllic places where the pace of life slows down, everyone knows their neighbors, and your business is never really your own. The setting is close to my own heart; I’m from Clemson, South Carolina, a small college town at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Small towns are a place where the close-knit community can turn upside down and violent in a heartbeat, and there are often a myriad number of unseen connections just below the surface.
The fifteen essays in The Best New True Crime Stories: Small Towns cover a wide range of crimes from the emotional tragedy of the loss of a five-year-old girl in a horror show of a murder (“Who Killed Gabrielle Schmidt: The True Story and the Mystery Surrounding a Forgotten Murder” by Alexandra Burt) to the most influential and shocking mass murder in Australian history, The Port Arthur Massacre (“Nameless in Van Diemen’s Land” by Stephen Wade) in a powerful and passionate essay about the two days that brought about Australian gun control.
In between those extremes, you learn some truly crazy things. I’d never heard of the backwoods German cannibal who literally solicited a victim to be willingly eaten piece by piece (“In the Home of the Cannibal” by Joe Turner)! Even more, I wouldn’t have expected a home tour of the place it happened and a running commentary; now that’s what you call a true exclusive! I will be doing further research into the story of El Mano Negra, and you will be too after a uniquely styled presentation of that nasty tale (“The Black Hand and Glass Eye of Earlimart: A Killer’s Perspective” by Christian CiPollini). The tale of a theatrical sexual predator with some truly bizarre habits (“The Summer of the Fox” by Mark Fryers) is worth the price of admission alone.
The theme of the small town left scarred is dominant, and for good reason. Much like that famous NY Zoo exhibit, “The Most Dangerous Animal in the World” (if you don’t know what I’m talking about then LOOK IT UP), The Best New True Crime Stories: Small Towns reminds us that even in the most peaceful of settings, the human being is still the baddest baddie in the whole show. It’s a lesson that’s handled with a great deal of social conscience and respect by everyone involved; Mitzi Szereto is very selective when she puts a lineup together. As usual, all contributors are detailed and bio’d at the end of the book so you can dig up some more of their work (because you’ll want to).
The best entries in the collection let you really know the towns and their relationships with their collective dark legacy. Pay close attention to “Tragedy in Posorja: When People’s Justice Goes Horribly Wrong” by Tom Larsen for a killer example of this (and a history lesson on indigenous cultural practices as a bonus). Even in the entries where the tale is simply more procedural and matter of fact (“Twenty Cents Worth of Arsenic” by Edward Butts), you see the hallmark of one of Szereto’s collections: all the entries are laden with the labor of true research and investigation. No one is mailing it in here.
Another hallmark of a Mitzi Szereto collection? It took me a hell of a lot longer to finish it because I kept going to Google and finding a story’s particular rabbit hole.
That’s not a complaint.
Grade:
4.0 out of 5.0 stars
Contributors:
Anthony Ferguson, Tom Larsen, CL Raven, Edward Butts, Mitzi Szereto, Mark Fryers, Alexandra Burt, Charlotte Platt, Christian CiPollini, Iris Leona Marie Cross, David Brasfield, Deirdre Pirro, Paul Williams, Joe Turner, Stephen Wade
