Maybe I'm setting myself for disappointment but ever since reading Truman Capote's In Cold Blood I've been looking for its modern-day equal. Midnight in The Garden of Good and Evil came close but slightly missed the mark. I was cautiously optimistic when I read a description of Fatal Vision describing it as "a true-crime classic." It became clear very quickly that I was in for another disappointment.
The journalistic ideal of remaining objective and keeping the writer out of the story is necessary in short form and hard news reporting but in longer works it creates an unnatural distance between the reader and the story and a linguistic frigidity that leaves the prose feeling awkward and clunky. In Fatal Vision the absence of the writer-voice is noticeable to the point of being unsettling.
Furthermore McGinniss, like many true-crime writers, relies far too heavily on investigative and court transcripts leaving large sections of the text unedited, dull, and stylistically incongruent. The reader never connects with the killer, the victims, or the investigators. The story feels like it's being told by a dispassionate omnipotent narrator, the proverbial god who doesn't care. And if the writer can't be bothered to care, why should the reader?
Before In Cold Blood I had written off true-crime as drugstore counter trash. Surely no good prose could be wrapped in glossy salacious packaging with raised bubbles promising "26 Pages of Crimes Scene Photos!" And unfortunately Joe McGinniss does nothing to change this perception.
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