TALES OF LOHR: J. REUBEN APPELMAN'S "WHILE IDAHO SLEPT"

On the decades-long constant Capote chase

There is a perfectly reasonable argument to be made that, since this newsletter is dedicated to explorations of art and creativity, I shouldn’t even be writing about J. Reuben Appelman’s While Idaho Slept: The Hunt for Answers in the Murders of Four College Students (HarperCollins, 2023). Appelman’s work as a journalist and writer falls firmly in the realm of straight journalism rather than any sort of speculative or imaginative literature; his principal foray into writing for the screen was not for a thriller feature or police-procedural TV series, but rather for the Netflix documentary Playground: The Child Sex Trade in America. And when he is not producing books, Appelman can be found plying his trade as a private investigator in Boise, Idaho, where he has resided for almost 25 years. So it would be fair to assert that Appelman’s book, which takes a microscope to the senseless-as-far-as-we-know November 2022 murders, in Moscow, Idaho, of university students Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle, and Ethan Chapin, in the campus-adjacent home where Mogen and Kernodle (and, then until only recently, Goncalves) resided, is in no way intended as a piece of art, and that one should not presume to regard or attempt to evaluate it as such.