Harvest Season

The explosive growth of true crime as a popular entertainment genre has created a cultural phenomenon wherein individuals perform “detective” work from home, without credentials or connections to the case. Online communities on platforms like Reddit, Discord, and TikTok dedicate themselves to solving active criminal cases, treating them as interactive mysteries to be crowdsourced and cracked. A 2024 YouGov survey found that half of American adults (57%) say they consume true crime content, with a majority agreeing that it makes people more vigilant (63%) and helps solve crimes that wouldn’t be otherwise (50%) (“True crime: How does the genre affect Americans?” YouGov, 22 July 2024). However, positive opinions about true crime have dropped since a similar poll they conducted in 2022, which asked if participants believed true crime increases empathy with crime victims. The number agreeing with this sentiment dropped by 10 percentage points, indicating a growing concern over how this content depicts victims and how it encourages viewers to engage with the crimes.

The internet has long served as a means for people to discuss cases and offer new theories, at times with damaging consequences. During the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing investigation, Reddit users on the subreddit forum r/findbostonbombers incorrectly identified Brown University student Sunil Tripathi as a suspect. Tripathi, who had been missing and was later found dead by suicide, became the target of a viral harassment campaign that flooded his family with threats within hours. Reddit’s then-general manager Erik Martin issued a formal apology, acknowledging that “online ‘witch hunts’ […] caused harm to innocent people” (Kaufman, Leslie. “Bombings Trip Up Reddit in Its Turn in Spotlight.” The New York Times, 28 Apr. 2013). This tendency has become more prevalent alongside the increasing presence of social media and true crime content in daily life.

The 2021 disappearance of 22-year-old Gabby Petito marked a new inflection point, when TikTok’s #GabbyPetito hashtag surpassed one billion views as amateur sleuths dissected her Instagram posts, van-life vlogs, and bodycam footage frame by frame (Jones, CT. “How Gabby Petito’s Death Changed TikTok’s True-Crime Community.” Rolling Stone, 17 Feb. 2025). While a handful of tips proved genuinely useful—including drone footage from a travel blogger that helped locate her van—the phenomenon also generated wild misinformation, harassment of the Laundrie family’s neighbors, and a documented spike in tips about other missing persons that overwhelmed police resources.

Ethicists have raised further alarms about compensation and consent: victims’ families rarely profit from—or approve of—the content built around their loved ones, and podcasters have been sued for defamation after naming private citizens as suspects. In Harvest Season, the “Sleuthseekers” Discord group directly mirrors this reality. Their arrival dramatizes the thin line between civic engagement and morbid tourism, transforming a series of deaths into spectacle and creating immediate danger for the novel’s protagonists.