Quick Take
- Narration: Therese Plummer brings measured emotional intelligence to material that could easily tip toward exploitation, maintaining the book’s journalistic-literary register throughout.
- Themes: online mythology and offline violence, early-onset schizophrenia and missed diagnosis, the legal and moral complexity of childhood crime
- Mood: Disturbing and deeply sad, with the investigative patience of long-form journalism and none of the sensationalism the subject could invite
- Verdict: A careful and genuinely compassionate account of the 2014 Wisconsin Slenderman stabbing that treats mental illness, internet culture, and justice with the seriousness they deserve.
I first heard about the Slenderman stabbing through a brief news item in 2014, the way most people did: two twelve-year-old girls, a classmate stabbed nineteen times in the woods, the perpetrators claiming they did it because an internet monster told them to. The story had the quality of an urban legend about urban legends. It was impossible to sit with for long because it seemed to resist ordinary interpretation. Kathleen Hale’s book, which calls itself the full story told for the first time, does the hard work of making the story interpretable, and it does so without making it simple.
What Hale has written is not primarily a book about Slenderman the meme, even though understanding the meme’s architecture is essential to understanding what happened. It is a book about Morgan Geyser, the girl at the center of the violence, who had been living with undiagnosed early-onset schizophrenia for years before the attack. The internet mythology was the form her psychosis found, not its cause. That distinction is the book’s central and most important argument, and Hale makes it with the careful, reported specificity it requires.
The Diagnosis That Changed Everything
The most significant material in Slenderman, and the element that separates it from sensationalized crime accounts, is its detailed engagement with Morgan’s psychiatric history. The revelation, documented through court records and interviews, that she had been seeing Slenderman for years before the stabbing, that the figure was integrated into a broader delusional framework produced by schizophrenia rather than simply imported from the internet, reframes the entire case. One reviewer described the attack as a tragic perfect storm of undiagnosed mental illness and children’s unrestricted internet access, and that framing is accurate, though Hale handles the mental illness component with considerably more depth than the internet-access component.
The question the book implicitly asks, and does not quite answer, because there may not be a clean answer, is how much Morgan’s experience of Slenderman was constituted by the internet mythology and how much was generated by her own mind using whatever cultural material was available. This is a genuine epistemological problem in cases involving psychosis and popular mythology, and Hale is honest about its difficulty rather than resolving it artificially for narrative convenience. That restraint is one of the book’s most important qualities.
Anissa Weier and the Question of Shared Belief
Anissa Weier, Morgan’s co-conspirator, presents the book’s harder moral problem. She did not have schizophrenia. Whatever she believed about Slenderman, she arrived at it through ordinary adolescent credulity rather than psychotic delusion, which made the legal distinction between the two girls more significant. Hale covers this with appropriate care, neither pathologizing Anissa’s susceptibility to a frightening mythological narrative that many children encountered without committing violence, nor minimizing her role in what happened. The section dealing with both girls being tried as adults is among the book’s strongest and most genuinely troubling, because it surfaces the inadequacy of a legal system built for typical adolescent development when confronted with these specific circumstances.
Therese Plummer and the Ethics of Narration
This is the kind of true crime material that a careless narrator can damage badly, either through excessive drama that tips into voyeurism or through a detachment so clinical it erases the human cost. Plummer walks that line with notable care. She is experienced with literary nonfiction and serious journalism, and she brings that register to Hale’s prose. The passages dealing with Morgan’s psychiatric evaluations and the description of the attack itself are handled with appropriate gravity, neither underplayed nor exploited. CrimeReads called this one of the best true crime books of the year it was published, and the narration serves that status.
Who Should Listen / Who Should Skip
If you have any interest in the intersection of internet culture, mental illness, and juvenile justice, this is among the most carefully considered accounts in the true crime space. It is not light listening. The material is genuinely distressing, particularly the sections dealing with Morgan’s psychiatric history and the victim’s long-term trauma. Readers who approach true crime primarily for the procedural elements, the investigation, the trial, the verdict, may find Hale’s focus on Morgan’s inner life somewhat imbalanced toward the perpetrator’s perspective. Those who are willing to sit with moral complexity rather than resolution will find it genuinely illuminating.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this book primarily about internet culture and Slenderman the meme, or about the specific legal and psychiatric case?
Primarily the latter. Hale uses the meme’s architecture to establish context, but the book’s real subject is Morgan Geyser’s schizophrenia, the inadequacy of the systems that should have caught it earlier, and the legal complexity of trying a severely mentally ill child as an adult. Readers expecting a deep dive into internet mythology will find the psychiatric and legal material much more extensively developed.
How does Kathleen Hale handle the victim in this account, given that most of the attention is necessarily on the perpetrators?
With care and restraint. Hale does not use the victim’s experience voyeuristically, but she does document the long-term trauma that results from surviving this kind of attack, which serves as a necessary counterweight to the reader’s natural tendency to psychologize the perpetrators. The victim’s survival is not treated as a convenient resolution.
The book is categorized under computers-technology. Does it seriously engage with internet culture as a causal factor, or is that framing incidental?
The categorization is somewhat imprecise. The book engages with Slenderman as a product of internet myth-making and with the question of how online spaces shape the beliefs of children with undeveloped critical frameworks. But the deeper argument locates the primary cause in undiagnosed mental illness. The internet is a significant contextual factor, not the central explanation.
Is Therese Plummer’s narration suited to the true crime genre, or does she bring a more literary sensibility to the material?
She brings a literary sensibility, which is the right match for Hale’s prose. This is not a procedural true crime narrative with the pacing of a detective story. It is reported literary nonfiction that asks serious questions about psychiatry, law, and childhood. Plummer’s measured register suits that ambition considerably better than a more sensational delivery would.
