Features
- Cover Type: Paperback with 560 pages
- Published by: Signet; 20 Annual edition June 12, 2001
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 0451203267
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-0451203267
-
Book Dimensions:
6.9 x 4.2 x 1.4 inches
- Weighs: 10.4 ounces
Product Review
Not long ago, true crime writer Ann Rule recalls lying on an operating table. The anesthesiologist leaned over before putting her to sleep. "Ann," the anesthesiologist said softly, "tell me, what was Ted Bundy really like?" Despite meeting Florida's electric chair in 1989, the subject of Rule's bestselling book continues to haunt her. Rule and Bundy were friends. They met in 1971 at a Seattle crisis clinic, where they shared the late shift answering a suicide hotline. Their subsequent conversations, meetings, and letters spanned the rest of Bundy's life as he evolved into one of the century's most notorious serial killers. It's been twenty years since Rule first penned this chilling account. But the story--and her 2000 update--will still have readers reaching for their Xanax. No gratuitous gore here; just the basic, bone-chilling evidence. In fact, like a protective mother shielding us from horrors too awful to mention, Rule seems to avoid delving too deeply into crime scene descriptions. She devotes one paragraph in her new afterword to her discovery that Bundy engaged in necrophilia and returned to the scenes of his crimes to "line dead lips and eyes with garish makeup and to put blush on pale cheeks." She tells readers that John Hinckley, who shot
Ronald Reagan, and David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam Killer, traded prison correspondences with Bundy. And she hints that Bundy's insatiable killer instincts may have started when he was a 14-year-old paperboy. (Ann Marie Burr, an 8-year-old girl on his route, mysteriously disappeared in the middle of the night and has never been found.) The skimpy update is over too soon, leaving readers wanting more and offering further proof of the public's never-ending fascination with serial killers.
--Jodi Mailander Farrell
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Library Journal
Rule met Bundy at a local crisis counseling center. Sharing long nights helping those who felt that suicide was the only option, they developed a friendship. She believed that she knew the handsome psychology major about to attend law school; however, she only knew a part of the man. Bundy was also a cold-blooded serial killer. This story follows Rule as she at first denies that the Bundy she knew could have committed these murders, and then the realization that he was ruthless, dangerous, and evil. Lorelei King is a phenomenal reader; her vocal characterizations never seem forced and fit seamlessly into the narration. Listeners will be spellbound and anxiously awaiting the next twist, when they are not double-locking their windows and doors. A wonderful tape that will find a home in all true crime collections. One warning: some of the descriptions of the crime scenes and murder victims are a bit graphic and may want to be avoided by those with delicate constitutions. Danna Bell-Russel, Library of Congress
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Reader Reviews
This review is from: The Stranger Beside Me: The Twentieth Anniversary Edition (Hardcover)
I had heard of this book, of course; had wanted to read it for years, so when this 20th anniversary edition came out, I decided to give it a go. I had a pre-conceived notion: OK, this is going to be a really interesting biography of Ted Bundy, with the added attraction of having been written by a former dear friend. Fast, easy crime reading, I thought. I was wrong. This story is so chilling, so frightening, it grips you in the gut. Ann Rule has simply stated the facts. No sensationalism, no gratuitous gore, no psychobabble. Just the facts. As they happend. And even though the reader might think of Ted Bundy as "old news," and even though he was executed in 1989, this book makes one check to see that the doors and windows are locked. There are actually two stories here: one describes the gradual disintegration of a seemingly normal, affable, brilliant man into a sexual psychopath so evil, so methodical in his vicious killings, that one wonders if he was at all human. The other story is that of Ann Rule herself, a decent, hard-working, middle-aged mother of four who meets and befriends a nice young man working beside her in a crisis clinic. A man she regards as a younger brother; a man she views as a close and trusted friend. The slow but inexorable realization on Rule's part that this man is in fact an unspeakably violent serial killer is as painful to read as it was for her to experience. Each victim is described in terms of such respect and such anguish that even a family member, I think, can feel that his or her daughter has been given a chance to shine, a chance to be more than a victim, more than a nameless number (8th girl killed, and so forth). The poignancy of these girls' very human preoccupations and lives serves to outline the contrasting horror in even more detail. That is why Rule does not have to defile the victims with intricate detail. The contrast between their young lives and their terrible deaths is enough in itself. Rule's new Afterward, written in 2000, is fascinating. She has not "recovered and moved on"; there is no real "closure." She has come to accept that the incomprehensible contrast between Ted the Dear Friend and Ted the Monster will never leave her, and will never be fully explained, no matter how many facts she sifts, no matter how much progress has been made in understanding the sexual psychopath. It is her fate to have known Bundy in all his skins; it is our privilege to read her account of it.
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