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The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America
by Erik Larson
Almost Too Strange to Be True
A review by Tom Chiarella
You've got to respect a book that makes you keep flipping to the back cover, double-checking that it is nonfiction. Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City seems like something from the mind of, say, Thomas Harris. But it is, in fact, true. A gruesome and gripping book, it tells the oddly intertwined tales of Daniel Burnham, visionary builder of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, and H. H. Holmes, doctor, hotelier, and America's first urban serial killer. The book chops back and forth in somewhat artless prose between the story of Burnham, who drove the fair to be the greatest public spectacle of the century, and that of Holmes, who lived at the edge of the event, preying upon young women. Holmes's story, naturally, is the more compelling. He's a blue-eyed con man who built a hotel full of complex vaults and secret passages for the express purpose of gassing, skinning, and filleting his victims (this with the hotel at full occupancy!). He is so ruthless, so clever and arrogant, so precisely American, so wickedly vicious, you can't believe he existed. At times the book reads like a 400-page treatment for the inevitable movie, and it occasionally shoots off on tangents — like the one about the design of Chicago's Ferris wheel. But the heart of the story is so good, you find yourself asking how you could not know this already.
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