'Captive Audience: A Real American Horror Story' and the Fallacy of 'True' Crime

. The paradox at the heart of Gottschall’s book—full of stories as it is, in its own right—is that as effective as stories can be in promoting empathy, they can also tear humanity apart. Storytelling is, in Gottschall’s estimation, “our doom and our salvation.” More to the point here, a story is “always an artificial, post-hoc fabrication with dubious correspondence to the past.” But it often feels like the best we can do to make sense of things.

Dimmock seems aware of these notions as she weaves a complicated story while avoiding convolution. As the directors Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin illustrated in their 2021 documentary, one way to tell a story that’s been told so many times is to tell its telling. This grounds things sturdily, for the mechanics of how a story are told are far more objective things to work with than the actual product of those mechanics.This method also telegraphs a sense of how things unfolded in people’s minds.

Dimmock weaves certain similarities of Steven’s and Cary’s stories together—Yosemite was where Parnell headed after he kidnapped Steven, and it was also the scene of Cary’s crimes. Ashley, Steven’s daughter, talks about being captivated by reports of the people that went missing from Yosemite—Carole Sund, her daughter Julie, and friend Silvina Poloso—and shares that the flutter of hope she had was much like that which her grandmother, Kay, held onto for Steven in his seven-year absence.

While the full story of the seeming curse the Stayner family has endured remains shocking and sad beyond comprehension, it’s the people—the humanizing—that makethe moving experience that it is. Dimmock’s refusal to compress and simplify yield brilliance. Her approach creates palpable tension at times. Regarding her uncle’s murders, Ashley warns against simplistic narrative, “Nobody really can sit there and say, ‘Yeah. This is why this happened.

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