Book Review: The Stranger Beside Me: The Shocking Inside Story of Serial Killer Ted Bundy by Ann Rule

Book #173 of 2022:

The Stranger Beside Me: The Shocking Inside Story of Serial Killer Ted Bundy by Ann Rule

I sometimes have difficulty rating pieces of nonfiction, but my general principle is to weigh a work against the best possible version of itself, by asking what the author is trying to accomplish and how well I believe they’ve achieved it. In the case of this true-crime title from 1980, I’m not entirely convinced that that benchmark has been met.

The story behind the story remains incredible, even four decades on: writer Ann Rule was already under contract to write a book about a string of unsolved murders when she learned that a friend she’d met as a fellow volunteer on a suicide crisis hotline had been arrested and charged with the crimes. Ted Bundy is now known as a notorious serial killer, pedophile, and rapist, and this account of his awful prolific career preying on young women and girls in the 1970s is appropriately harrowing in its details of how he would kidnap and brutalize his victims. But it doesn’t yield much insight into what it was like for the journalist herself to go through this journey of discovering and confronting the truth of the matter. Although Rule can provide quotes from her personal correspondence with Bundy, her presentation of the facts doesn’t read as too dissimilar from what anybody else could have written on the subject.

Now, as a reader largely unfamiliar with the man beforehand, I am satisfied — well, horrified, but you know — with The Stranger Beside Me. The author ably captures his dangerous charm and his reputation as a folk hero for his multiple prison escapes, as well as his cruelty and of course his terrible body count. It’s all pretty thorough and shudder-inducing, and I expect I’ll feel no particular urge to read anything about Bundy ever again. But if I had come to this volume previously aware of those things, I think I would be disappointed by the lack of personality exhibited in its pages. It’s ultimately not a narrative about the late Ann Rule at all, even though she’s the distinctive element here and one of the two parties referenced in the title. When I consider how much of herself Michelle McNamara poured into I’ll Be Gone in the Dark as merely an obsessive amateur researcher on the Golden State Killer, it’s hard not to feel let down by the relative neutrality of this genre predecessor that could/should have contained so much more firsthand material.

[Content warning for ableist slurs.]

★★★☆☆

Like this review?
–Throw me a quick one-time donation here!
https://ko-fi.com/lesserjoke
–Subscribe here to support my writing and weigh in on what I read next!
https://patreon.com/lesserjoke
–Follow along on Goodreads here!
https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6288479-joe-kessler
–Or click here to browse through all my previous reviews!
https://lesserjoke.home.blog