Many thanks to Jordan Foster and Lisa Levy at The Life Sentence for letting me join the fun during the True Detective roundtable. If you’re a fan or a critic of the show there are quips galore.
True Detective Roundtable
Tag Archives: true detective
Three recent novels by Stephen Graham Jones, Attica Locke and Michael Farris Smith through the lens of Repo Man and True Detective:
There’s a scene in Repo Man where a car-lot attendant explains to a young repo man how the world operates, a worldview he calls the “lattice of coincidence.”
“Suppose you’re thinkin’ about a plate of shrimp,” he says. “Suddenly someone’ll say, like, ‘plate’ or ‘shrimp’ or ‘plate of shrimp’ out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin’ for one, either. It’s all part of a cosmic unconsciousness.”
Lately, my plate of shrimp has been True Detective. It’s been at least six weeks since the season finale and I can’t stop thinking about the show. I see it everywhere—even in the books I read. But is it me, or is it the “cosmic unconsciousness”? Because the last three books I read all contained uncanny echoes of True Detective.
There’s been a ton of great writing about True Detective and its influenes in the weeks leading up to it finale on Sunday night. Here’s a closer look at the ur text of True Detective source material, Robert Chambers’s The King in Yellow.
An element of the supernatural hangs over the stories like black stars over Carcosa. These elements do a marvelous job of distracting the reader from the fact that none of the narrators can be believed. It matters less that their sanity has been compromised than the fact that their accounting of events is highly suspect. If you’ve been paying attention to True Detective, you know that the detectives’ unreliability is crucial to the how the story-within-the-story unfolds.