A handsome man buys a pharmacy in Chicago. He's warm, charismatic, kind. He's also built a sound-proof gas chamber and a hot, hot kiln exactly large enough to fit a human body. The city is in turns sweltering and frigid. The water is contaminated and the air black and rotten. And it's 1893: the year of Chicago's World's Colombian Exposition, or World Fair. Luxuriant architecture painted all white, lagoons of deep emerald, exhibits of both animals and humans alike on display for the American public.
Such charm and savagery exist in this nonfiction account of serial killer H.H. Holmes and the Chicago fair. More history than true crime, it takes the reader through the time period and the intense struggles of a single city.
As someone who wrote research papers on serial killers in middle school, I've long been fascinated with true crime, the psychology of killers, and the musings on morality that surround them. That being said, I didn't love this book. Mostly, I think this is due to false advertising. The book purports to be true crime with a splash of history about the World Fair, but it ends up being history about the World Fair with only a splash of true crime. I understand that Larson needs to set the scene (and he does this extremely well), but the book simply wasn't what I wanted it to be. I did, however, learn a lot. I didn't even know America had held a World Fair or that the Ferris Wheel was named after the guy who invented it. This is speculative true crime a la Capote's In Cold Blood. There are historical facts, but Larson takes a lot of liberties in envisioning the people and their lives, so the actual facts in the account are flimsy. Most importantly, though, I think that nonfiction authors have a duty to treat their subjects with respect, and I don't Larson paid his due. He wasn't particularly offensive, nothing like that. The book just lacked a real warmth and care about the people he was documenting. Sure, it's hard to have empathy for a serial killer and whether or not we should is an entire debate in of itself, but Larson deployed a very subtle condescending, almost mocking tone throughout the piece. And in places where I expected a bit of derision, I didn't get it. He said nothing about the exploitation of Native Americans in Buffalo Bill's show and the overall misogyny of the time period. This probably won't bother most readers, and if I hadn't read books by authors who do write with an underlying empathy, I wouldn't even have noticed these gaps (but I did). Well-written? Decently. Interesting? In some places more than others. Would I recommend it? For popular history fans, yes. For true crime lovers or the general public, no.
4/10 📕