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Selling Out the Dead
The tricky business of promoting my true-crime book
I didn’t read a true-crime book until after I’d written my own. This would explain why my true-crime work, The Kill Jar, doesn’t play by the rules. I simply didn’t know there were any rules until after I wrote it. The Kill Jar is as much a memoir as a dissection of the Oakland County Child Killings circa 1976 to 1977 in Detroit, and thereby falls outside the norm.
Mostly, the book gets a lot of four- and five-star reviews from readers who appreciate that I wove my personal narrative with the narrative of the crimes. There are also readers who say things like, “Who cares about Appelman’s shady, drug-addicted girlfriend! I want to know about the murders!” And I’ve been accused of being a narcissist for speaking about myself in the same sentence as the dead, even though a major goal of the book is to connect the living with those who we’ve lost. Insinuations that I’m self-serving are always hurtful but those few disgruntled readers approach The Kill Jar through a strict true-crime genre lens, so they’re understandably disappointed. They don’t get what they expect and they give the book meager stars to reflect that. I’ve mostly stopped reading reviews, but on occasion, I will glance at my Amazon rating, and I’ll feel either joy or anguish—predicated not by the reviews themselves but by the degree of shame I feel at having looked at the reviews in the first place.
I like to think that public reception doesn’t matter, that we write the book we were meant to write. In fact, I didn’t even set out to write about a true crime event. But perhaps I should have known I would end up in this genre: As a child, somebody had tried to abduct me during a period when the city of Detroit was on alert for a serial killer of children. It’s natural that my own abduction story, as uneventful as it was, would make me obsessed with unsolved child killings, which would turn into a major focus of my work.
I was standing guard, trying to protect future victims, but, like most obsessives, I was also standing guard over something from the past.
I need to confess, though: I’ve always been an obsessive. Once, a woman from my graduate school…
