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DISCO BLOODBATH

Name: DISCO BLOODBATH
Author: James St. James
ISBN: 0-684-85764-2

A FABULOUS BUT TRUE TALE OF MURDER IN CLUBLAND

by James St. James ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 1999

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Michael Alig was a top promoter in the deviant, drug-soaked Manhattan club scene of the early 1990s. The party ended when he savagely murdered a drug dealer and deposited the dismembered corpse in the river. Three years later, scenester St. James tattles on his homicidal pal in an unformed, exploitative, and cobbled-together work. St.James betrays his friend Alig’s confidence—not for personal gain, of course, but for soul-searching purposes: “I had to look at the monster in me that could love someone like this.” Yet most of the book is devoted not to analysis of Alig’s background and motivation, but to St. James’s wearying recall of their heady years grappling for supremacy in the top echelons of club society. This hazily jaundiced narrative offers only unappealingly reductive portraits of club kids, gay nightlife, and druggies. St. James dishes endlessly on such topics as his ketamine addiction and his circle’s catty social rituals, but his inability to convincingly contextualize his tale—to place the hedonistic club scene within a larger portrait of fin-de-siäcle Manhattan, or to humanize Alig as something more than a cipher- turned-inept-killer—reduces his book to a mere check-list of seamy tropes. Disco Bloodbath is a dreary and minor retelling of a tale whose principals have long since been exhumed by the mainstream media.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-684-85764-2

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999

Categories:

TRUE CRIME

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MY STORY

by Elizabeth Smart with Chris Stewart ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 7, 2013

Smart hopes that sharing her story might help heal the scars of others, though the book is focused on what she suffered...

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The inspirational and ultimately redemptive story of a teenage girl’s descent into hell, framed as a parable of faith.

The disappearance of 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart in 2002 made national headlines, turning an entire country into a search party; it seemed like something of a miracle when she reappeared, rescued almost by happenstance, nine months later. As the author suggests, it was something of a mystery that her ordeal lasted that long, since there were many times when she was close to being discovered. Her captors, a self-proclaimed religious prophet whose sacraments included alcohol, pornography and promiscuous sex, and his wife and accomplice, jealous of this “second wife” he had taken, weren’t exactly criminal masterminds. In fact, his master plan was for similar kidnappings to give him seven wives in all, though Elizabeth’s abduction was the only successful one. She didn’t write her account for another nine years, at which point she had a more mature perspective on the ordeal, and with what one suspects was considerable assistance from co-author Stewart, who helps frame her story and fill in some gaps. Though the account thankfully spares readers the graphic details, Smart tells of the abuse and degradation she suffered, of the fear for her family’s safety that kept her from escaping and of the faith that fueled her determination to survive. “Anyone who suggests that I became a victim of Stockholm syndrome by developing any feelings of sympathy for my captors simply has no idea what was going on inside my head,” she writes. “I never once—not for a single moment—developed a shred of affection or empathy for either of them….The only thing there ever was was fear.”

Smart hopes that sharing her story might help heal the scars of others, though the book is focused on what she suffered rather than how she recovered.

Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2013

ISBN: 978-1-250-04015-2

Page Count: 320

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | TRUE CRIME

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LUCKY

by Alice Sebold ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 1999

Told with mettle and intelligence, Sebold’s story of fierce determination to wrest back her life from her rapist will...

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A stunningly crafted and unsparing account of the author’s rape as a college freshman and what it took to win her case in court.

In 1981, Sebold was brutally raped on her college campus, at Syracuse University. Sebold, a New York Times Magazinecontributor, now in her 30s, reconstructs the rape and the year following in which her assailant was brought to trial and found guilty. When, months after the rape, she confided in her fiction professor, Tobias Wolff, he advised: “Try, if you can, to remember everything.” Sebold heeded his words, and the result is a memoir that reads like detective fiction, replete with police jargon, economical characterization, and film-like scene construction. Part of Sebold’s ironic luck, besides the fact that she wasn’t killed, was that she was a virgin prior to the rape, she was wearing bulky clothing, and her rapist beat her, leaving unmistakable evidence of violence. Sebold casts a cool eye on these facts: “The cosmetics of rape are central to proving any case.” Sebold critiques the sexism and misconceptions surrounding rape with neither rhetoric nor apology; she lets her experience speak for itself. Her family, her friends, her campus community are all shaken by the brutality she survived, yet Sebold finds herself feeling more affinity with police officers she meets, as it was “in [their] world where this hideous thing had happened to me. A world of violent crime.” Just when Sebold believes she might surface from this world, a close friend is raped and the haunting continues. The last section, “Aftermath,” has an unavoidable tacked-on-at-the-end feel, as Sebold crams over a decade’s worth of coping and healing into a short chapter.

Told with mettle and intelligence, Sebold’s story of fierce determination to wrest back her life from her rapist will inspire and challenge.