by D.A. Stern
2000 Gallery Books
An author visits an elderly former priest who set himself and his wife on fire. He receives the old man's diary in the mail, which details his interactions with Rustin Parr, the serial killer in the backstory of The Blair Witch Project. Or is he? Not giving anything away that wasn't revealed in the scare quotes of the back cover, or early on in the text. The story itself doesn't end with anything more than that, just that the surviving kid might have done it, which doesn't explain the whole standing in the corner thing, the creepiest part of the movie.
I always thought the fake documentary stuff released around the movie was better than the film itself, and I was hoping for more of the same here. There are some elements of this trying to be a fictional non-fiction book, but it's not, it's structured as a literary narrative. There are some old photos which have a tenuous connection to the story at best, and a couple pages of sources for a book that has two: the diary and the "author's" direct experience. The diary isn't written as a diary, but as a non-linear fictional narrative.
Stories get nested several deep, with the author quoting a diary which has a flashback with someone telling a story, etc. Nothing wrong with that, except that the book is 90% framing device and 10% story, and at 150 pages that's a lot of filler.
A missed opportunity. Not much added to the mythos, no more details of the killings, and a big reveal which was already given away. The "entirely different story" is not in this book, just a third of a page of Parr saying he didn't do it.
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