Book #15: The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

I've literally had this book on my to-read list on Goodreads for two plus years. And I'm glad I finally got around to it. This book tells the story of the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893, and how it came about, how they put it together, and how it affected American culture afterwards. At the same time, the book also talks about Chicago serial killer H. H. Holmes, who lured innocent and vulnerable fairgoers and murdered them for his own pleasure. He may have killed up to 100 people, although that's probably an exaggeration, but he definitely built a whole hotel, with a creepy murderer's basement, for the express purpose of finding and killing victims. So you basically learn about the whole story of the fair and this murderer at the same time.

Honestly, I felt like these two storylines didn't overlap all that much. By the title, I expected that the murderer was going to the fair and killing people at the fair itself. But no, he was finding victims before and after the fair; his actions weren't all that related to the fair storyline. So I don't know, I think that Larson maybe could have done these stories completely separately and been pretty successful. There wasn't much of an overarching connection at the end to bring everything together. I also didn't really like how Larson dramatized some of the elements he was writing about. Unless it's a stylistic decision about the genre, I don't think that non-fiction writers should dramatize or imagine things about their books. Larson tended to make up motives for things that Holmes did and included them as facts, but they were completely made up (as he said in the notes at the end).

However, each story was very interesting. I loved seeing a look into Chicago in the 1890s, and I felt like I really got the emotions of the city and the expectations they had for the Fair. I loved learning about the World's Fair and the amount of community pride and work that it took to get it ready and going in time. And it was very interesting to learn about all of the things that are still familiar to us in culture today that came out of the fair itself, considering how most people today barely know that it happened. And I was very creeped out and disturbed by the story about Holmes and his evil plans, which is to be expected. This book was definitely worth a read and definitely a great glimpse into a time period that I wasn't familiar with, but probably should have been.