Coming at this knowing little more about Dahmer than what is public knowledge, I got a lot of out this book but at the same time see a missed opportunity for it to be so much more. Backderf keeps it mostly in the perspective of his teenage self and there's not as much reflecting and introspection as I'd expect. More time is spent trying to recreate what is going on with Dahmer during the years that nobody's paying attention to him via pieces of Dahmer's testimony and the accounts of other people and, although those parts humanize Dahmer, they feel thin and sort of untrustworthy. 
 This isn't to suggest that Backderf is untrustworthy or did a bad job, it's just that there's no way to attempt to recreate what's going on there truthfully. I think he does as good of a job as he can, and that's why this gets three stars instead of two. But I'd rather he didn't make that such a focus and spend more on what he knew: being the classmate of Dahmer. What that was like and what it is like reflecting on that would have been more interesting and true.