Unspeakable Acts

Crime writer Sarah Weinman is back, and I for one couldn’t be more excited. Unspeakable Acts is dedicated to “those who find meaning, solace, catharsis, and outrage in crime stories, which is all of us.” This anthology highlights a wide spectrum of voices, where Weinman spotlights a new crop of true crime writers — ones who, as she writes, “centered the victims as human beings rather than rely on the trope of beautiful white dead girls,” ones who have an intersectional approach to their writing and understanding of crime, and ones who are women and people of color. Weinman expands the idea of what a crime story is — one of the stories is about a woman who treats gunshot wounds, and one on a woman who faced brutality at the hands of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. There’s also a dive into the disappearance of Sage Smith, a Black trans woman living in Charlottesville, and a fresh perspective on Ted Bundy, among other stories.

Weinman is conscious of the limits of true crime. As she wrote in BuzzFeed, “The scales have fallen from the eyes of true crime consumers. Murder and violence as entertainment was always difficult to stomach, but there was the hope — and I certainly felt this — that the ethical thorniness could be counteracted, by centering victims and de-emphasizing traditional law-and-order narratives. It seems clear that true crime hasn’t gone nearly far enough. It also seems clear that the genre as a whole needs to be upended from the ground up. If the true crime boom of the past six years has begun to wane, where does it go next, and what is the genre’s future?”

Maybe a book like Unspeakable Acts.

When I chatted with Weinman around the publication of her last book, The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel that Scandalized the World, she told me that “true crime is less about a gender issue; it’s a very white field. And you see that in terms of what kind of stories get highlighted… I feel like, I know the stories I’m best equipped to tell. But I want many, many more stories from different communities and those are the ones that I want to make a point of seeking out.” And seek them out she did; you won’t want to miss this collection of stories.

Rating: ★★★★★