Emma Copley Eisenberg is a journalist who researched the murders of young women headed for the Rainbow Gathering, a music festival in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. Thanks go to Net Galley and Hachette Books for the review copy, which I received early in exchange for an honest review.

What I was expecting from this book is not at all what I got. The cover suggests something spooky, and the topic also tells me this is a true crime story. The promotional blurb says it’s

Part “Serial”-like investigation, part Joan Didion-like meditation, the book follows the threads of this crime through the history of West Virginia, the Back-to-the-Land movement, and the complex reality contemporary Appalachia, forming a searing portrait of America and its divisions of gender and class, and its violence. 

Instead, it’s a strange mishmash of genres that don’t blend well, and the result is a wandering narrative entirely devoid of suspense or even focus of any kind, and though I tried reading it multiple times, then checked out the audio book from Seattle Bibliocommons, I could not push myself all the way through this thing. I resolved to finish it and get it reviewed, and I wouldn’t let myself read anything else till it was done; the result was that I found excuses not to read or listen to anything at all. I finally let myself off the hook, but not until I had skipped to several parts of the second half, just to make sure there was no shining epiphany at the end.

It’s a tough spot to be in, journalistically speaking, because Eisenberg spent five years researching “these brutal crimes,” but she came up dry. How do you squeeze a story out of that? Instead of writing about the murders, she mostly writes about herself investigating the murders, making this story more of a journalistic memoir with a side serving of Pocahontas County history and culture.

If this is what the book is, then it should be sold as such. The title is deceptive, and the murky woodland illustration on the cover is deceptive as well. A journalistic retrospective should be billed as exactly that, so why wasn’t it? Possibly because nobody wants to buy a journalistic retrospective. Why not? Because it’s boring, boring, boring.

Ordinarily I would be gentler with a writer that’s published a debut, but I came away feeling resentful of the time I wasted reading and listening to a book that wasn’t what the reader was led to believe. I felt this way when I read it free; how might you feel if you ponied up the jacket price only to find that it’s not scary at all, and says little about the murders it’s supposed to be about?

No. No, no and no.