Reading Novel: The Devil in the White City - Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America
I was genuinely excited to get back into this story every time I picked it up. At times, this jumble of factual events felt like a tale I would contrive while wandering aimlessly around Wikipedia (even though Erik Larson says he did not get information from the internet because, apparently all, data found on the internet is questionable).
Most of the dramatic facts this book will tell you show up near the top of the internet, and many are proclaimed at a bars when someone lets everyone know where Pabst won their blue ribbon and follows with, “A young man by the name of George Farris went to that same fair in Chicago, 1893 — and he built himself a wheel.”
The best story and the reason why I wanted more was the story of Holmes, who murdered dozens while becoming America’s first serial killer. I didn’t really care for the ten plus pages describing where the fair would go and then what park in said city it would be in. Some of these details were distracting and took too long. As the reader, I just wanted to get to the gruesome parts.
People like to say that non-fiction, “reads like fiction,” when they think it is good but that doesn’t make much sense to me. Books without dialogue generally feel to me like Wikipedia, and they're good when I am able to stay interested.
