Blurb

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Splendid and the Vile comes 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. 

“As absorbing a piece of popular history as one will ever hope to find.” —San Francisco Chronicle

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.

Review

I’m pretty sure I added this to my To Be Read list back in 2022 when Keanu Reeves signed on to a Hulu series with Martin Scorsese and Leo DiCaprio. That has since fallen apart, but the source work remains.

This wound up being a contender for top five books I read this year, although for a guy who ranks nearly everything, I never had done a Top Books year-end list. Always figured my reading is too eclectic for that. My list would have some random health and nutrition book right next to some 19th century frivolity.

Devil in the White City sits in that sweet spot of novelized nonfiction, in that you probably should do some fact checking after reading it, but oh what a ride. The grandeur of what was at the time one of the biggest spectacles in recorded history, plus a serial killer ride. What could go wrong?

The book bounces between the two main characters, Burnham and Holmes, generally swapping chapters back and forth. The Fair and Burnham side read like nonfiction. The Holmes aspects reads like a novel, even the parts that are true. Larson takes some liberties with the latter, predisposing things that could only be known to people who would have never had the opportunity to relay those thoughts or actions. You will have to forgive him for that, because it works.

Burnham and the Fair have largely been lost to the national psyche, but some of the things to come out of it have persisted more than a century later, even if no one remembers where they got their start (Ferris wheel, anyone?).

As for Holmes…the devil indeed, at a time when no one had an idea of what that exactly meant. The Holmes “character” may seem mundate by today’s standards, but for 1893, not even close.

Should you read this? Yes.