The Mushroom Tapes by Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein

The Mushroom Tapes is an unusual and compelling addition to contemporary true crime, shaped as much by reflection as by reportage. Written collaboratively by Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein, the book documents their shared attendance at the trial of Erin Patterson, convicted of triple murder following a fatal meal involving poisonous mushrooms. Rather than offering a linear reconstruction of events, the book unfolds as a record of the writers’ private conversations as they travel, observe proceedings, and process what they have witnessed inside a small regional courtroom.

The structure is deceptively simple. The three writers attend hearings, sit among journalists and members of the public, and retreat each day to talk through what they have seen and felt. These recorded discussions form the backbone of the book. Courtroom testimony, forensic detail and legal procedure are present, but they are filtered through the authors’ evolving impressions and disagreements. The result is a narrative that resists the neat certainties often associated with true crime, favouring instead an exploration of doubt, contradiction and emotional residue.

What gives the book much of its texture is the interplay between the three voices. Garner brings her characteristic moral restlessness and attention to small human gestures, often circling questions of responsibility and witness. Hooper contributes a more narrative-driven sensibility, attentive to character, atmosphere and the strange theatre of the court. Krasnostein grounds the conversations with her legal expertise, repeatedly returning to the limits of evidence and the gap between legal truth and lived reality. None of the writers dominates for long. The shifting balance mirrors the unsettled nature of the case itself.

Throughout the book, the trial becomes a lens for examining broader concerns. The authors grapple with public fascination, media spectacle and the ethics of watching suffering at close range. They interrogate their own motives for being there, aware of the uneasy overlap between curiosity, professional duty and voyeurism. Questions of gender, domestic power and betrayal surface repeatedly, alongside reflections on how ordinary objects and routines can become freighted with horror. The courtroom emerges not only as a site of judgement, but as a space where social anxieties, moral expectations and collective projections converge.

The Mushroom Tapes reads more like a chamber piece than a conventional work of non-fiction. The dialogue-driven format creates intimacy and immediacy, while also exposing moments of disagreement and uncertainty. At times the approach can feel fragmentary, even elusive, especially for readers seeking definitive conclusions. Yet this is clearly deliberate. The book’s power lies in its refusal to simplify or to resolve what remains ethically and emotionally unsettled.

The Mushroom Tapes marks an important experiment in collaborative non-fiction. It challenges the dominance of the single authoritative voice that has long defined the genre, replacing it with a conversation that acknowledges its own limitations. In doing so, it offers a thoughtful meditation on justice, storytelling and the human impulse to make meaning from tragedy. More than a record of a notorious trial, it is a study of how intelligent, reflective observers grapple with the discomfort of knowing, and not knowing, too much.

Reviewer: Chris Reed

Text Publishing