Kathleen Hale is the author of four books spanning narrative nonfiction, essays, and young-adult fiction. Across genres, her work examines crime, obsession, friendship, identity, mental illness, internet culture, and the stories people tell about each other.
Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls
Narrative nonfiction · Grove Press · 2022
On May 31, 2014, two twelve-year-old girls in Waukesha, Wisconsin, lured their classmate into the woods and attempted to kill her, believing they were acting for the internet-born figure Slenderman. Drawing on years of reporting, court transcripts, police records, and interviews, Hale reconstructs the crime and its aftermath while examining childhood psychosis, moral panic, and a justice system unprepared to respond to profoundly mentally ill children.
Recognition: Winner of the Society of Midland Authors’ Richard Frisbie Award for Adult Nonfiction; nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime; recognized by the Wisconsin Library Association with an Outstanding Achievement Award; named a Best Book of the Year by Audible and CrimeReads.
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Related writing: “Living with Slenderman” in Hazlitt · “Escaping Slenderman’s Shadow: The Release of Morgan Geyser” in CrimeReads
Kathleen Hale Is a Crazy Stalker: Six Essays
Essays · Grove Press · 2019
In six essays, Hale moves between memoir, reported narrative, and cultural criticism, writing about sexual assault, online obsession, environmental illness, motherhood, hunting, and the uneasy border between predator and prey. Across the collection, dark humor and reporting coexist with a refusal to make difficult experience cleaner or simpler than it was.
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Nothing Bad Is Going to Happen
Young-adult mystery · Kippy Bushman #2 · HarperTeen · 2016
A few months after solving her best friend’s murder, Kippy Bushman hopes life in Friendship, Wisconsin, might return to normal. Then she finds her boyfriend barely breathing. The sheriff calls it a suicide attempt; Kippy suspects a setup. The sequel returns to Hale’s strange Midwestern town for another mystery about grief, paranoia, and what survival looks like after the case is supposedly closed.
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No One Else Can Have You
Young-adult mystery · Kippy Bushman #1 · HarperTeen · 2014
In Friendship, Wisconsin, high-school senior Ruth Fried is found murdered in a cornfield. When local authorities settle on the wrong suspect, Ruth’s best friend, Kippy Bushman, begins her own investigation—armed with Ruth’s diary, an obsession with Diane Sawyer, and very little sense of self-preservation. A darkly comic mystery about grief, loyalty, and the violence beneath small-town politeness.
Recognition: Named one of TIME’s Top 10 Young Adult Books of 2014.
kathleenhale.org 