People Who Eat Darkness

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People Who Eat Darkness

By: Richard Lloyd Parry

Narrated by: Simon Vance

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About this listen

In the summer of 2000, Jane Steare received the phone call every mother dreads. Her daughter Lucie Blackman - tall, blonde and 21 years old - had stepped into the vastness of a Tokyo summer and disappeared forever.

That winter, her dismembered remains were found buried in a desolate seaside cave. Her disappearance was mystifying. Had Lucie been abducted by a religious cult? Who was the mysterious man she had gone to meet? What did her work, as a 'hostess' in the notorious Roppongi district of Tokyo, really involve? And could Lucie's fate be linked to the disappearance of another girl some 10 years earlier?

Over the course of a decade, Richard Lloyd Parry has travelled to four continents to interview those caught up in the story and been given unprecedented access to Lucie's bitterly divided family to reveal the astonishing truth about Lucie and her fate.

Richard Lloyd ParrySimon VanceAudible Studios

Murder

True Crime

Disappearance

Crime

Emotionally Gripping

Scary

Thought-Provoking

Murder True Crime Disappearance Crime Emotionally Gripping Scary Thought-Provoking

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Most relevant

Both instances involve a fast-paced, exhilarating ride with twists and turns and highs and lows, but the former typically concludes with a smooth, controlled stop, whilst the latter instead culminates in a regrettable and devastating crash.

The writing is consistently good. Excellent even. Where the book falters is in the content and the editing. Most of the way through the book, I was thoroughly enjoying myself and had expected to wholeheartedly endorse it. Imagine how jarring the contrasting section must have been given that I must instead bestow it with the worst endorsement a book can receive. I couldn't finish it. I just didn't want to hear the rest.

The book has flaws, both large and small. It seems to have undergone a radical "Americanisation" to its detriment. Many chapters end with a reality-television-esque cliffhanger ending, as though the editors were paranoid the reader would lose interest in the intervening turn of a page to the next chapter. This seems to be par for the course, as far as true crime novels are concerned, but is still rather irritating.

The author seems to attribute far too much time to the inevitable, foreboding omens that seem to accompany all tragic events. Those along the lines of "two weeks before my daughter left, I had a dream where she was surrounded by sinister Asian men, and then when she went missing and I knew that it had been a sign all along." That sort of nonsensical hindsight bias is frequently indulged and my eyes roll harder with every incident.

By far the biggest issue is the Author's incessant need to interject himself and his opinions into the subject matter. The Author's role in the events of the story is evidently minuscule, yet entire chapters seem devoted to personal accounts and anecdotes about people and events only tangibly relevant to the narrative. He devotes enormous amounts of time to chastising the media for their biased depictions of the involved parties, defending the inept Japanese police force amidst a torrent of blunders and the eerily sycophant justifications for Tim Blackman's behaviour.

The events having reached their seeming conclusion, I found that I still had almost two entire hours left of the book and what followed was just an impassioned, yet hypocritical, sermon of the immoral sensationalization of the events and long-winded assertions such as that it's unfair to blame Japanese culture, and by extension, the entire Japanese nation for the actions of a few bad apples, and how we shouldn't be so quick to judge people faced with difficult choices we will likely never have to face, and the paralyzing waft of condescension and sanctimony because too much to bear.

It was at this point I decided to give up, satisfied that I had gleaned the meat of the story and that what would follow would simply be more of the same tripe.

The narration is excellent. The reader has an irritating habit of pronouncing silent h's in words like "which" and "when", but that seems to be shared by every audible narrator.