The first murder I remember was a ghost story, told at my summer camp in Michigan. I was around 12, so this was in the time of disco. At night, in a dark cabin, a girl told the rest of us about her older sister’s friend. Or maybe her friend’s older cousin: one of those twice-removed protagonists of a supposedly true account. She wasn’t a murder victim; rather, she’d had a close call, a near miss, with a man who later turned out to be a serial killer, the perpetrator of what became known as the Michigan Murders. She’d been walking home late at night from a party in Ann Arbor when a good-looking guy on a blue motorcycle pulled up next to her, offering a ride. She felt a warning twinge, said no thanks and watched him drive off. The next day the cops found a young woman who had been strangled and raped, a tree branch shoved up her vagina.

This is the kind of story you hear at camp, or the kind you tell, a currency that girls exchange for shock value and popularity. I don’t know if the boys’ cabins traded the same kind of ghost stories. All kids worry about death; when the lights go out, we talk about what scares us: the near miss, the victim that could have been us. Why did we thrill so to these stories? What possible benefit could we derive from hearing about someone like us who had met the worst possible fate — not dying from a freak accident or a sudden illness but dying the way girls were killed: intimately, sexually, compulsively, fueled by jealousy or entitlement or rage?

Then I turned 15 and aged out of camp. I was eligible to work as a counselor-in-training — I was just about to send in my application when my friends and I went to see a new movie, “Friday the 13th,” about a group of camp counselors methodically hunted down and murdered, one by one. I never sent in the application. I started reading true-crime books around the same time. I read the most horrifying things I could find, devouring with nearly equal pleasure the schlockiest, mass-market, formulaic true-crime story and the pristine prose of Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.” (I shivered more at the latter, but I loved them both.) I read about parents who killed their children, children who killed their parents, spouses who killed each other. The scariest were the killers who murdered total strangers, often in connection with a miswired sexuality that confused rage and arousal, like Ted Bundy, or the man behind the Michigan Murders.

True-crime books paired well with the hard-core punk music I liked and the all-black outfits I wore. But the books weren’t just for show. Seeing the truth of the world laid bare — all its potential for violence and suffering, but also the wild leaps of survival, the close calls that turned out O.K. — this was what I craved. I loved it but it scared me. Or I loved it because it scared me. Then I grew up and had my first child. The vulnerability of new motherhood rendered true crime unbearable. A few months later, I donated several boxes containing all my true-crime paperbacks to Goodwill. I kept “In Cold Blood.”