Darkness can descend anywhere: This is a bleak truth pushing the gravity through Howard Blum’s “When the Night Comes Falling: A Requiem for the Idaho Student Murders.”  

The crime this book is based on happened in Moscow, Idaho, a place I managed to visit in the aftermath – and a place that feels a lot like Davis and Chico.

Of course, there are differences in their terrain. Moscow is tucked under the Palouse Hills where slopes are covered in snowberry, tall wheat and dormant tractors defying gravity on the steeper pitches. Driving in, one sees that it’s a vibrant college outpost in the hardest parts of the High West. The century-old brickwork along its main street features pubs, galleries, restaurants and cafes, while at night the trees are decked in blue fairy lights that create the illusion of an arctic glow against long sunsets at the end of town.

I split mornings in Moscow between two bookstores which also serve as independent coffeehouses. At daybreak I’d watch locals cozy into both, grabbing lattes and occasionally getting up to browse the spines of everything from fantasy novels to poetry collections. When things warmed up, Moscow’s farmers market was an especially bustling scene, with young musicians playing old time ballads on banjos and mandolins and families sampling craft Kombucha, homemade Baklava, honey cups and elderberry syrups. The city’s Celtic pioneering roots are on display to anyone who makes it out to the county fair: Dangerous bacon dishes; farmers inspecting livestock; teens showcasing traditional Scottish dancing for older town folk who grew up there – it all carries on a homesteading legacy of northern Idaho.

I mention this to stress that no one expected Moscow to be the stage for the country’s most-publicized murder saga of late. Similar to Chico, the university’s stately crimson stone and tree-lined campus spill directly into Moscow’s timeworn avenues. There’s a tranquil sense that the college and community are locked into one easy rhythm of life. Perhaps that is why it cut so deep when, in the pre-dawn hours of November 13, 2022, four students were brutally slain in their rental house not far from their classrooms. When portraits started circulating of these victims – Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle, Kaylee Goncalves and Ethan Chapin – they took a grim hold on the national imagination; or at least that part obsessed with true crime.

Four promising young faces ended in a blink?

It hit a spiritual nerve from coast to coast.

Howard Blum, who spent years as a reporter for The Village Voice and The New York Times, seems to have understood the fact that this knife-inflicted terror went down in a place as sedate as Moscow would keep picking at some comforting skin of safety and security.

Blum first arrived in Idaho to cover the crime for Air Mail. At that point, he was far from alone.

“We were just hit with an army of reporters,” a young man at Moscow’s Neat Whiskey Bar told me. “They were roaming all over the campus, sticking microphones in kids’ faces, whether they knew anything about the victims or not.”

He finished pouring me a shot of Balcones Brimstone – blue corn Texas whiskey – and then casually shook his head. “I suppose,” he went on, “they were just trying to get whatever sound bites they could get.”

He and I were talking after the disorienting media blitz was over. But one person who was still making visits, and working sources in Moscow, was David Blum. He clearly wanted to create a defining nonfiction account of the blood and tragedy, not to mention the strained, often bewildering police investigation that eventually led to the arrest of 28-year-old Bryan Kohberger for quadruple homicide.

Kohberger was a criminology Ph.D. student at nearby Washington State University who seems to have stepped out of the pages of a Thomas Harris novel. Early reporting paints him as a socially awkward loner whose personality was slyly arrogant and hostile to women – and apparently obsessed with violent predators. It’s thought that Kohberger’s criminal justice major provided him with the perfect opportunity and official cover to indulge these morbid fixations. The position also put in him orbit of many young female students between Pullman, Washington and Moscow, Idaho.

Kohberger had previously studied under Dr. Katherine Ramsland, a top forensic psychologist who happens to be an expert on the serial killer Dennis Radar, better known as the BTK Killer.

Kohberger’s alleged inability to relate to, or empathize with, women seems to have cost him a teaching job and graduate scholarship on the eve of the Moscow slayings. “When the Night Comes Falling” opens on Kohberger trying to explain these academic difficulties to his father, Michael, as the two take a cross-country road trip together in the staggering aftermath of the murders.

It’s this journey from Idaho to Pennsylvania that constitutes the opening of Blum’s book. By jumping the narrative through time, the author adds subtle layers of human weight and gravity to what happened at the crime scene. Its first act explores the friction between a worried father and his unraveling son – a tension hyper-pressurized over several days within the confines of a Hyundai Elantra. The second act reels back further to introduce readers to the four young faces who will face the ultimate horror in the shadows. The third act is a dramatis personae of the small-town police officers unaware that they’re about to confront the bleakest community nightmare Moscow could have imagined.

Blum’s unorthodox structure manages to crystalize the personalities involved in the story. That means by the time the terrible moments of November 13, 2022 are unveiled in his telling, the unbearable stakes of it all feel visceral.

Only after this apex does Blum’s narrative ease into a more chronological manhunt.

It won’t be lost on some that “When the Night Comes Falling” has parallels with Truman Capote’s classic “In Cold Blood.” Both are centered on the shock-and-awe of a quadruple-homicide in a peaceful farming community. Both are exhaustively researched and written with a powerful literary bent. And both present their rural settings as compelling, three-dimensional characters within the pages. But the comparisons end there. What Blum’s penned is not derivative. The book does a shrewd job of chronicling the role that social media influencers and personalities in the true crime entertainment complex played in steering the nation’s understanding of this event. Setting it further apart, the book’s sharpest passages involve an imagined dialog between the author and the killer, a kind of free-form psychic reach into the shuddering depths of stalking desire. It’s a device you don’t find in Capote – or most masters of the genre – and it effectively enforces the reality of monsters walking among us.   

That’s a lesson that students and residents of Davis recently learned without Blum’s tome. Davis is a college town that shares the same relaxing vibe as Moscow, with its university campus directly connected to the city’s historic district. Similar to Moscow, it feels like an inherently safe place. So, when Davis became the setting for random, ongoing bloodshed in the spring of 2023, it raddled many in the region to their core. Two vicious knife murders and an attempted murder were perpetrated by an assailant – reportedly Carlos Dominguez – who was people-hunting in the night-darkened streets of Aggie Land. One of the victims, Karim Abou Najm, was very much in the mold of the Idaho victims, a young student whose promising life was brutally cut short. The people of Davis are still reeling from what happened. And as a crime reporter who worked that case, I know that sometimes when the night comes falling, it can take a long time before it lifts again.  

Scott Thomas Anderson is also the writer and producer of the true crime podcast series “Trace of the Devastation.”