BEHOLD THE MONSTER

Lauren reflects on her relationship with a serial killer.

Samuel Little confessed to killing 93 women between 1970 and 2005. The FBI has confirmed his involvement in at least 60 of these murders, making Little the most prolific known serial killer in U.S. history. Before Little died in a Los Angeles prison in 2020, Lauren, the author of the memoirs Everything You Ever Wanted and Some Girls, exchanged letters with him and, ultimately, conducted hundreds of hours of face-to-face interviews over the course of a few years. This book is an amalgam of scenes from the author’s relationship with Little, records of her interactions with law enforcement, vignettes from her travels to understand the murderer and his victims, a memoir of this time in her life, and imagined narratives about the women Little killed. Attempting to give Little’s victims a voice through fiction makes emotional sense, and it might make artistic sense in a different kind of narrative. However, this is a nonfiction book, and this choice casts a cloud of confusion over the entire text. Re-creating important moments and filling the gaps between the known and the unknown with educated guesses is an important skill for nonfiction writers, but Lauren doesn’t make it easy for readers to understand when she’s quoting someone directly or when she’s making a guess at what they might have said. It’s not always clear when she’s relating something she knows because she was there or because she has solid documentary evidence—or, instead, cobbling together a scene from bits and pieces of information she’s gathered. The lack of any obvious chronological throughline also makes this book difficult to comprehend and appreciate. Perhaps the material worked better in Confronting a Serial Killer, a docuseries Lauren hosted on the Starz network. The book includes an introduction by Michael Connelly.

A true-crime grab bag.