BOOK REVIEW - The Devil in the White City

I figured I should read it before they make the movie -

The Devil in the White City:
Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America
2003, Crown Publishers
By Erik Larson

The Devil in the White City is the non-fiction historical story of the creators and forces behind the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago and the serial killer Herman Webster Mudgett (a.k.a. Dr. H. H. Holmes). The book is written in an engaging, narrator-based manner that makes it seem like a novel based upon these characters (and Larson does take the time to build each person as a character rather than a static member of the past).

The book is broken up into several sections based on the timelines they encapsulate, but there are only two clear stylistic sections. The first (and the majority of the writing) and is a split-story that follows the development, building, and running of the World’s Fair, while also coving the simultaneous exploits and acts of Mudgett. Larson excels here at capturing the personas of the people he writes about, transforming this historical work into a character-driving drama that travels along several threads at the same time. I was struck how closely this section mirrored the style and tone of Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (2006), and Larson’s similar ability to tie together these seemingly disparate stories about people who never actually meet (except for a one bloody exception involving some of the smaller ‘cast’ members).

The second major stylistic area occurs after the World Fair, as a detective trying to track down the evidence necessary to convict Mudgett as the monstrous killer he was. This section flows like a Dragnet-esque detective novel, and succeeds in driving home how completely foreign the nature of these crimes were to the 1890’s mindset, a time when Jack the Ripper was the only true serial killer the public had encountered.

Overall the book is an excellent and fairly quick read - it is easily in my top 10 of the last decade. With a film to come out next year, if you haven’t read (or listened to the audio version), it should definitely be on your list from this winter.

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