Grisly goings-on in the Windy City. While Chicago prepared to host the 1893 World's Fair, a serial killer was preying on the young women who were attracted to the excitement of the fair. Fascinating, informative and chilling. H. H. Holmes finally gets the attention he deserves!
— Alden Graves
Barely two decades after its Great Fire, scorned by the Eastern elite as a backward cowtown, Chicago seized its chance for prominence hosting the 1893 World's Fair. The obstacles were immense; the personalities were sometimes difficult; the result was magnificent, as long as a blind eye faced the horror.
— Mike HareA history of the characters and circumstances behind the building of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. Larson's telling reads like a novel as he chronicles a city struggling to define itself in a world modernizing with increasing speed. Lurking underneath the bright lights and pleasing facades of a city built to impress the world is a serial killer who rivals the horrors of Jack the Ripper, and who will come to be considered one of America's first serial killers. I was surprised to learn of the great impact this World's Fair had on American culture and technological progress, as well as how easily a cold blooded killer could use his charm and charisma to hide in plain sight while committing such horrible crimes. — Allen Boulet
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The true tale of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago and the cunning serial killer who used the magic and majesty of the fair to lure his victims to their death.
“Relentlessly fuses history and entertainment to give this nonfiction book the dramatic effect of a novel .... It doesn’t hurt that this truth is stranger than fiction.” —The New York Times
Combining meticulous research with nail-biting storytelling, Erik Larson has crafted a narrative with all the wonder of newly discovered history and the thrills of the best fiction.
Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America’s rush toward the twentieth century. The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham, the fair’s brilliant director of works and the builder of many of the country’s most important structures, including the Flatiron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington, D.C. The murderer was Henry H. Holmes, a young doctor who, in a malign parody of the White City, built his “World’s Fair Hotel” just west of the fairgrounds—a torture palace complete with dissection table, gas chamber, and 3,000-degree crematorium.
Burnham overcame tremendous obstacles and tragedies as he organized the talents of Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles McKim, Louis Sullivan, and others to transform swampy Jackson Park into the White City, while Holmes used the attraction of the great fair and his own satanic charms to lure scores of young women to their deaths. What makes the story all the more chilling is that Holmes really lived, walking the grounds of that dream city by the lake.
The Devil in the White City draws the reader into the enchantment of the Guilded Age, made all the more appealing by a supporting cast of real-life characters, including Buffalo Bill, Theodore Dreiser, Susan B. Anthony, Thomas Edison, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and others. Erik Larson’s gifts as a storyteller are magnificently displayed in this rich narrative of the master builder, the killer, and the great fair that obsessed them both.