When Alex Murdaugh’s wife and youngest son were murdered on their thousand-acre property in South Carolina’s Low Country in 2021, Lasdun was working on a novel whose central character fails to recognize the evil in front of her. Covering the Murdaugh saga for the New Yorker became a way for him to wrestle with his own inability to accept the existence of evil at its most extreme in a “family annihilator”: a locally famed patriarch convicted of killing his own wife and child. Lasdun is lured into the entirety of Alex’s web, from his deep community ties and intense familial loyalty to his sinister series of interconnected misdeeds: unexplained (or unsatisfactorily explained) deaths of community members, extreme drug use and possible gang entanglement, and extensive financial theft. The author’s desperate quest is to understand what could possibly drive a man to kill his own family, and he pursues his mission with an obsessive, dogged, and sometimes speculative fullness, unwinding every spool of the Murdaugh family’s persistently ascendant generational wealth and its insulating facade of invincibility in a place increasingly marked by destitution, drugs, and decay. Lasdun’s bewilderment and dissatisfaction with every element of the murders and the legal case seeps palpably to the page, drawing readers into an investigator’s obsession, though the text does miss an opportunity to address the twisted appeal of such deranged stories of true crime. There is a distinct regional flavor to the story, with prayerful juries, marshy landscapes, and an abundance of guns and good ol’ boys, but the picture of an “exceptionally crooked man, with some alarming ways of handling pressure” that emerges not only exceeds southern stereotypes and wealthy villain caricatures, but defies any understanding of limits to human depravity.
English (US) · 