Allison: A Poetic Diary

Allison: A Poetic Diary is a short, controlled experiment in form, and it knows exactly what it is doing. The diary-in-verse conceit is announced in the preface with disarming modesty ("I was never very good with paragraphs or essays"), and the book spends twenty-one entries letting that plain, clipped voice do its quiet work.

The structure is the book's real achievement. Dated entries from June to July 1981 build a patient escalation: the newspaper-reading regular who "looked up at the right moment," the surveillance ("I had to see her during the day / Her patterns"), the makeover, the invented persona. The most chilling device is the invented persona. "William" starts as a costume and ends as an alibi, a name the narrator can hand every terrible act to. Watch how the pronouns drift: "I" confesses in the early entries, then "William" takes over ("William made sure Allison was taken care of") until the narrator can say "He could come to her rescue" about a man who is himself.

The repetition is deliberate and pays off. "She will be mine" becomes "She will be ours," and the dutiful courtship details (Japanese dinner, chopsticks used "like scissors," the For Your Eyes Only date) sit beside the narrator's cheerfully flat reporting, so the dread builds from the gap between a charming date and a hunter's field notes. The fortune cookie, "There is a surprise in your future," followed by "Oh yes there is," is dark comedy that lands precisely.

The final entry is stripped of ornament, and that restraint lets the ending hit as hard as it does. The closing line, "Such a shame / We will miss Allison," is as chilling as the book can make it.

A reader of true-crime-adjacent psychological horror, or anyone who likes a verse form bent to unsettling ends, will find a lean, memorable book here.