SLENDERMAN

An unsettling chronicle of the “Slenderman” stabbing and its subsequent courtroom debacle.

In 2014, two 12-year-old girls in Waukesha, Wisconsin, planned the murder of their friend. They believed her death would appease Slenderman, a fictional character popularized by the website Creepypasta, an aggregator of user-submitted ghost stories. On May 31, Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser lured Payton Leutner into the woods and stabbed her 19 times. The girls left her for dead, although miraculously, Leutner survived. Quickly apprehended, Weier and Geyser entered the inconceivably slow stream of Wisconsin’s criminal justice system. Hale breathlessly recounts this unspeakable tragedy but holds her focus on the courtroom and society’s failures in treating the mentally ill. Her message is resonant: We must do better for those in need. However, Leutner’s trauma often feels sidelined while Hale tries to promote awareness and dismantle the stigmas surrounding mental illness. Much of the book is Geyser’s story. She was dealing with schizophrenia with little understanding that her illness was something treatable. “They said I was trying to get attention,” she explained years after the incident. Her parents were in denial, and her “teachers had neither the time nor the training” to be supportive. Complicating things further, Wisconsin law allows children to be tried as adults in certain circumstances, a legal gray area that stuck Weier and Geyser in a dangerous three-year limbo between jail and a mental health institute before their judgment. The power of online media remains chillingly present throughout the narrative. During a “livestream of the trial on Facebook,” Hale writes, “internet commenters were offering their opinion of [Geyser’s] character,” some even calling her an “evil creature” that should be killed. Beyond the horrific incident at its center, the book expands into a searing criticism of how society treats (and mistreats) the mentally ill.

A relevant true-crime cautionary tale as well as an urgent plea for mental health awareness.