We open in 1977 to a mom awakening to hear noises in the backyard. Grabbing a baseball bat, she slips outside to find the source. The sound of her slamming it into the fence and bushes wakes up the house. A little girl stands next to her dad in the middle of that night with his head in his hands, her traumatized mom crying, claiming she saw someone, and they ran off.

The next day, her mom tells her safety is an illusion, and she carries that all her life. Sharing her trauma, her diary, and her fear with her children as they grow.

We learn that her mom had a younger friend and coworker, Rob, who didn't survive John Wayne Gacy. This is a dive into what it was like to witness a loss of her friend, and the capture of a killer, through her daughters eyes, and how that generational trauma carriers on and spreads its fingers further.

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This is going to be long, so buckle up.

I really wanted to like this book. Hearing about the effects of generational trauma and community trauma is vastly interesting and such a nuanced field. However, I could not stand the author. I had to stop multiple times to just bathe in her audacity and single-minded focus to her own relation to her mother's grief.

Very early on, we're brought to Courtney and her mother visiting the previous location of the Gacy residence. They discuss that there's no memorial for the dead boys at the home or in town and that it's erasure. It has been two decades since John Gacy was executed, 40+ years since he was active. New people live in that home and have for decades. Why would a memorial need to be present in a place where a murdered thrived decades ago? It completely dismisses that the families of those 33 boys and men may not want that for them. They may not want to see a reminder of their dead family. They may grieve and carry on in different ways. Who would want something erected to the person they loved in the place they were brutally murdered and stored, and then upkept for 40-50 years after they passed? Especially when that house is now someone else's home. This starts off the tone of the book, where the authors self-interest continues to override common decency.

It oddly feels like the narrator romanticizes the murderer, survivors, and events surrounding it by consistently living in the past. The book spans 6 years of her actively interviewing and traveling and having conversations with her mother, as well as flashbacks to the past her mother lives. She interjects her beliefs on how people felt back then instead of impartially describing their actions, and it adds unnecessary sensationalism to what were already horrific events.

She pushes her mother to view his home, to visit the last place she saw her murdered friend alive (which of course no longer exists), and all of it for her own understanding now that she has sons. The author makes it all about herself and her feelings, even going on about how she wants to hold her hands in the cold water Rob was found in until her fingers get creased, but alas, she has a flight to catch. As she wipes away her tears. It feels very performative as the child of the woman who knew someone who died.

She continually, throughout the book, adds unnecessary details that are exasperating and in no way furthered the story, for example:

- the boys flirted with her mom unreciprocated, and that she was aware and also not aware of their crushes. She talked about her mom's teenage shoulders and how the boys wished she was their gf.

- she adds spiritual weirdness. She talks about her mom believing her baby crying out on the night that her own mother died was her dead mothers spirit passing through her baby. This scene is brought up twice

- We hear about what snacks she ate, when the bag was tossed out, what her mother's hair smelled like (free hotel shampoo and conditioner, fyi), her sneeze, if someone looked at their phone, etc. It just felt like meandering for the sake of hitting a character limit goal to publish the book

- she constantly uses redundant information. "He said he'd con kids by having them think he was a police officer, but he wasn't." Yes, we obviously know Gacy wasn't a police officer

- she describes in detail the house selling information, even talking about Zillow listings, and then ponders on why it could be listed and unlisted and then sell for a lower value. I think she genuinely forgot an economic recession occurred

- she claims her sister and mother have a sixth sense of intuition, and she has visions. She goes into detail about this, and it decimated any attempt at credibility

- she describes an officer unzipping his pants and urinating. It was so unnecessary. This is directly from the book:

"In the guest bathroom, Officer Schultz unzipped his trousers and urinated. When finished, he zipped up, pressed his finger down to flush, and heard the rumble of the furnace as it kicked on. The smell was unforgettable: rancid flesh liquifying in the summer sun." The entire book is riddled with moments like this. It's exasperating

She also seems to be a generally intrusive person with a poor understanding of boundaries and a heavy dose of mysticism. She wanders the neighborhood where Gacy lived, years after her first visit. Hoping to find someone to talk to about the murders, over 45 years later. She calls a neighbour who's selling their house to enquire if they lived there during the murders. Its unhinged behaviour and she acts on it constantly. When she wrote about her writing a Mother's Day card to a dead boys mother, decades after he passed, my jaw dropped. Her writing a note about how she deeply cared for Rob through her mother was horrifying. She and her mother filled out the card and dropped it at the woman's door and left, without a second thought as to how that could affect the other woman. The audacity to intrude on someone else's life by bringing up their grief and trauma to help themselves find some sort of misguided closure? Astounding.

Also, her feeling threatened talking to Michael and making the offhand comment that it's some "errant thread in [her] DNA connected to Gacy" is just such an out there statement. Just like she attributed being cautious of noises in a parking lot being due to Gacy, but also maybe being a woman, etc. Everything was conjecture and sensationalism. If anything, it's an awkward portrayal of someone grasping at straws to equate trauma to them, and not a lot of attempts at deep dives until the last chapters of the book.

She's trying so hard to make a legacy out of the past. Courtney openly tries to layer trauma on people. She kept pressing the lawyer for reasons to be haunted by Gacy. She asked him in multiple different ways, whether it affected him, whether he had nightmares, what he thought of the execution, etc. He very clearly said he was not affected. He didn't really think about it, etc. Yet she still stated that he has trauma due to it because he chose not to continue to be a lawyer on murder cases. Her own filter immediately views everyone as cascading levels of trauma with very little evidence it's anything but a feeling or a guess.

There was actually very little of interest, or that gave more intel into secondary grief. She danced around it, then pulled away, over and over again. As if by repeating what she thought, that would make it a fact. Its all presented so single-mindedly, and about how she feels about things and how she perceives other people should feel about things and she's in a constant state of needling and pushing to insist people linger and dredge up their own trauma.

More than once, I wondered what the point of all of this was? Generational grief is barely discussed from anything outside of her own sphere of interest and how it directly affects her. She alludes to others, but it's all from her sphere of what she thinks they actually mean. You get very little from her interviews at all, a basic conversation, and then a perception, and she's moving on. Nothing actually validates what she's pushing towards for the majority of the book.

Between all of the above and the authors self-promotion as some kind of victim advocate and guardian of trauma, I would in no way recommend this book. I'm sure much better works exist out there that don't put the daughter of the friend of a victim from 45+ years past on their own pedestal.

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Thank you, NetGalley and Kensington Publishing Corp. for the digital ARC copy. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Courtney Lund O’Neil’s Postmortem takes a haunting look at the people whose lives were forever changed by the John Wayne Gacy murders. Instead of just focusing on the crimes themselves, O’Neil does an amazing job of showing the ripple effects on the victims’ families and others who were touched by Gacy’s actions in ways they’ll never forget.

The book is really powerful, blending facts with emotion so you truly feel the loss, but also what managed to survive. O’Neil doesn’t hold back from the difficult realities of trauma but handles it with care and respect, offering a real look at how people are affected long after the media stops covering the story.

This isn’t just another true crime story; it’s about survival, resilience, and the heavy burden left behind by such a dark chapter in history. If you’re into true crime or interested in the personal stories behind the headlines, this is a must-read for those that are not easily triggered.