“It is somehow more eerie to hear a person narrate the impending doom in a horror story than it is to read the same words on a page…[as in this] true crime narrative by the friend of a serial killer…As dramatic and chilling as a bedroom window shattering at midnight.”
New York Times (audio review)
A Paris Review Selection
A BuzzFeed Books Pick of Great Books You May Not Know About
Utterly unique in its astonishing intimacy, as jarringly frightening as when it first appeared, Ann Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me defies our expectation that we would surely know if a monster lived among us, worked alongside of us, appeared as one of us.
With a slow chill that intensifies with each heart-pounding page, Rule describes her dawning awareness that Ted Bundy, her sensitive coworker on a crisis hotline, was one of the most prolific serial killers in America. He would confess to killing at least thirty-six young women from coast to coast and was eventually executed for three of those cases.
Drawing from their correspondence that endured until shortly before Bundy’s death, Ann Rule strikes a seamless balance between her deeply personal perspective and her role as a crime reporter on the hunt for a savage serial killer—the brilliant and charismatic Bundy, the man she thought she knew. Rule changed the course of true-crime literature with this unforgettable chronicle.
Praise