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Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls
Next in the queue
53
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
41/100Critics
65/100Scholars
Author:
Kathleen Hale
Publisher:
Grove Press
Date:
August 16, 2022
On May 31, 2014, in the Milwaukee suburb of Waukesha, Wisconsin, two twelve-year-old girls attempted to stab their classmate to death. Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier's violence was extreme, but what seemed even more frightening was that they committed their crime under the influence of a figure born by the internet: the so-called "Slenderman." Yet the even more urgent aspect of the story, that the children involved suffered from undiagnosed mental illnesses, often went overlooked in coverage of the case. Slenderman tells that full story for the first time.
What The Reviewers Say
Wildly unsettling.
If there’s a true crime voice, it’s that of a Midwestern prime-time news anchor, totally deracinated and mellifluous — the kind that makes the worst horrors seem matter-of-fact, not occasions for contemplation but for strict punishment. That isn’t Kathleen Hale’s voice, exactly, but it’s close.
The lurid headlines of the stranger-than-fiction crime missed many crucial facts about the case, which author Kathleen Hale lays out in rigorous step-by-step detail that’s the result of seven years of research.
Hale spends time carefully unfurling how Morgan’s rare, undiagnosed childhood schizophrenia created her fraught and hazardous inner world.
