Books like Invisible Darkness

“Invisible Darkness: The Horrifying Case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka” by Stephen Williams tells the real-life, true-crime horror story that took place in the 90s. The author was one of the only journalists allowed in the court room, and he tells the story in its entirety, from the couple’s initial meeting, to their despicable crimes, right through to the court case and the verdict.In 1992, I was ten years old. There was no Internet (as we know it today), and as such, I was sheltered from the horror that was happening just one town over. Due to Canadian rules around this case, a lot of the explicit court details were kept out of the press, as my hometown and its surrounding areas had never had anything more criminal than maybe a petty theft here or there, and, as can be expected, the region was pretty fired up. Today, these two abominations to the human race are still reviled and despised. In fact, Karla (I will not call her Ms. Homolka) cannot return to the province I live in, even though she is a “free” woman, due to the immeasurable amounts of death threats she still receives to this day. My personal geographic connection to the murders’ is likely the reason I chose this novel as my first exposure to the “true crime” genre. My obsession with the way the mind of a psychopath works was desperate to be given more, so I started here at the suggestion of a random email I got suggesting “the top five novels on psychopaths”. The beginning of Williams’ novels reads entirely different than the end. At the end, where Williams was actually present for the court case, it reads like a well-developed true crime novel. At the beginning, where Williams had no choice but to go on hyperbole and second- hand information, the novel was a little choppy to read, using sentences like “she had started going with this guy” and “Karla really liked Person A, he was super cool”. I felt like I was reading a story written by a twelve- year old, occasionally interspersed with big words they had looked up in a dictionary, but the information was fascinating and I was able to overlook the juvenile telling. Once the adult-sized Williams took over, the story was a little more cohesive with a better flow. Both characters are examined in detail, along with their obviously damaged personal histories. The novel provided me with information that has been purposely kept from Canadian media, and of course, that is the most fascinating bit. The mismanagement of this case by every legal, governmental and even policing body in this area does not give me confidence, and in fact, this is still a matter that is joked about today. Overall, this novel provided me with a solid sojourn into the true crime genre. It obviously had a powerful effect on me (knowing I had been to some of the places as the killers was creepy, and finding out the body parts of one of the victims had been buried merely kilometres away from my front door was even worse) , but the in-depth look into the minds of two of the most notorious Canadian psychopaths was just what I was looking for. A solid 3.5 stars for the disjointed nature of the novel, but definitely worth a read.