Blair's Reviews > Kill Show

(3.5) True-crime novels are having a big moment, and Kill Show wades into this increasingly crowded field with a relatively underused hook: a documentary TV series, the fictitious Searching for Sara. The show, broadcast in real time, became a phenomenon. It changed the lives of everyone involved: the family of a missing girl suddenly catapulted to a very strange kind of ‘fame’; the producer who built a career on the back of Searching for Sara’s notoriety; the residents of a small town suddenly overrun with media and conspiracy theorists. Kill Show purports to be an oral history of the show, documenting its effect alongside the fate of the girl at its heart, 16-year-old Sara Parcell.

Kill Show is compulsive reading – fast-paced, full of revelations, lots of characters, the plot rarely pausing for breath. This makes it a very compelling book, yet ultimately a little empty as a story, because we never learn who any of these people are beyond archetypes. The voices also don’t come across distinctly; these very different individuals all talk suspiciously similarly (this would probably be much less of a problem in audiobook format). Unlike recent novels in the same space – think True Crime Story, Six Stories, Penance – it doesn’t attempt any metatextual analysis beyond gesturing towards the idea that any engagement = consumption = perpetuation. Definitely worth a look if you enjoy stories of this type, but more of a beach read than a meaningful examination of true-crime-as-entertainment.

I received an advance review copy of Kill Show from the publisher through Edelweiss.