Awards

• Short-listed for Edgar Allan Poe Awards (Fact Crime) 2023

Overview

"The first full account of the Slenderman stabbing, a true crime narrative of mental illness, the American judicial system, the trials of adolescence, and the power of the internetOn May 31, 2014, in the Milwaukee suburb of Waukesha, Wisconsin, two twelve-year-old girls attempted to stab their classmate to death. Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier's violence was extreme, but what seemed even more frightening was that they committed their crime under the influence of a figure born by the internet: the so-called ""Slenderman."" Yet the even more urgent aspect of the story, that the children involved suffered from undiagnosed mental illnesses, often went overlooked in coverage of the case.Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls tells that full story for the first time in deeply researched detail, using court transcripts, police reports, individual reporting, and exclusive interviews. Morgan and Anissa were bound together by their shared love of geeky television shows and animals, and their discovery of the user-uploaded scary stories on the Creepypasta website could have been nothing more than a brief phase. But Morgan was suffering from early-onset childhood schizophrenia. She believed that she had seen Slenderman long before discovering him online, and the only way to stop him from killing her family was to bring him a sacrifice: Morgan's best friend Payton ""Bella"" Leutner, whom Morgan and Anissa planned to stab to death on the night of Morgan's twelfth birthday party. Bella survived the attack, but was deeply traumatized, while Morgan and Anissa were immediately sent to jail, and the severity of their crime meant that they would be prosecuted as adults. There, as Morgan continued to suffer from worsening mental illness after being denied antipsychotics, her life became more and more surreal.Slenderman is both a page-turning true crime story and a search for justice."

Full Product Details

9780802159809

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Reviews

Praise for Slenderman: Slenderman is a fluent and stylish account of a childhood folie a deux and its tragic aftermath. Through careful first-hand research and personal interviews, Kathleen Hale exposes the destructive force behind this case--not the fictional supernatural Slenderman, but the monstrous failure of the judicial system when it comes to forensic mental health. Slenderman is a work of wise sympathy. --Mikita Brottman, author of Couple Found Slain

Praise for Slenderman: A riveting and beautifully-written exploration of a tragedy, powered by rigorous reporting and equally rigorous sense of empathy. The Slenderman story that briefly obsessed the tabloids turns out to be about so much more in Hale's capable hands: Midwestern girlhood, early onset schizophrenia, the failures of our criminal justice system, and the uneasy power of childhood friendships. --Rachel Monroe, author of Savage Appetites Slenderman is a fluent and stylish account of a childhood folie a deux and its tragic aftermath. Through careful first-hand research and personal interviews, Kathleen Hale exposes the destructive force behind this case--not the fictional supernatural Slenderman, but the monstrous failure of the judicial system when it comes to forensic mental health. Slenderman is a work of wise sympathy. --Mikita Brottman, author of Couple Found Slain Slenderman is a tour-de-force, a riveting and shocking read. On one level, it provides a remarkable reconstruction of a chilling crime, the stabbing of a twelve-year-old by two of her friends--a murderous assault that she somehow survived. And simultaneously, it is a frightful tale of how the state of Wisconsin dealt with the deeply disturbed young girls who committed the crime. The product of immense amounts of painstaking research, Slenderman is a gripping and utterly compelling account of two overlapping nightmares. You won't soon forget this book. --Andrew Scull, author of Desperate Measures: Psychiatry's Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness

Author Information

Kathleen Hale is the author of two young adult novels and one essay collection. She has written for the Guardian, Hazlitt, and Vice, among others, and is a writer and producer for Outer Banks on Netflix. She was born in Wisconsin and lives in Los Angeles.

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