[Larson] relentlessly fuses history and entertainment to give this nonfiction book the dramatic effect of a novel, complete with abundant cross-cutting and foreshadowing … The Devil in the White City is given shape and energy by the author's dramatic inclinations. He succeeds in affirming the historical and cultural importance of the 1893 exhibition, which, he says, may have helped to spawn such other wonders as Disneyland and Oz. And he unearths a crime story of enduring interest, if only because Holmes, in the words of The Chicago Times-Herald, was ‘so unthinkable that no novelist would dare to invent such a character.’ A smart nonfiction writer did it instead.
In The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson wants to tell the whole story, both the glory of Burnham's creation and the sordid details of the first known urban psychopath in American history. It is not a comfortable fit. He uses language well, but has little sense of pacing or focus, perhaps because of the huge amount of material available on the fair … There is much less material available on H. H. Holmes, and Larson tells that part of the story economically. But he has added his own imaginative touches and sometimes goes farther than the sources warrant.
Burnham and Holmes are two sides of the coin, creatures of the new metropolis, using American energies and know-how to radically different purposes … Larson is a talented writer with a gift for surprising language, and an admirable impulse to show and not tell. The book whips back and forth from character to character, anecdote to anecdote, building plenty of momentum in the process … Larson has balanced beauty and terror, the genius and flaw of the modern city. The book is a parable, a kind of one-liner—is there always a devil in the white city?
… an earnest if overheated book that falls considerably short of its self-evidently large ambitions … Though both stories are intrinsically interesting, and though Larson has done his research thoroughly, the parallel tales feel a lot less like meaningful, revealing contrast than gimmicks around which to construct a book … The connection of Holmes to the fair seems manufactured rather than authentic, and every time the story shifts from the fair to the murderer, the reader is brought up short … Dramatic stuff all of it, and fascinating to read about. Unfortunately, Larson seems not to have enough confidence in the inherent interest of the story to tell it straight.
Readers will soon forget that Larson's work is nonfiction and, instead, imagine that they are holding a fictional page-turner … Although Larson believes the number is exaggerated, Holmes is said to have been responsible for 200 ghastly murders. In Chicago, during the fair, ‘it was so very easy to disappear’ … In Larson's book, Holmes represents the antithesis of the White City.
Larson mixes two stories that simply aren't related. The result is a synthetic blend that doesn't do justice to either … Alternating chapters of Burnham's accomplishments with Holmes' depravity, Larson drives his book to what should be the intersection of his characters' lives, but the stories are as far apart as the Museum of Science and Industry and the Loop … Adding to the artificial nature of the book are Larson's rambles of conjecture and his irritating use of what literary stylists call ‘foreshadowing’ … If Larson's book has lasting value, it's as the impetus to read more about the exposition, an event far more interesting than the author makes it out to be.
In his probing of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair — the White City — Larson juxtaposes the positive and negative elements of the approaching 20th century. The devil is H.H. Holmes, the physician whom Larson considers America's first serial killer. Holmes may have killed as many as 200, although Larson puts the figure at several dozen … Larson skillfully balances the grisly details with the far-reaching implications of the World's Fair. The event would introduce America to a range of new sensations, from Cracker Jack to belly dancing to a growing appreciation of urban life.
In roughly alternating chapters, former Wall Street Journal reporter Larson tells the stories of Daniel H. Burnham, chief planner and architect of exposition, and Dr. Henry Howard Holmes, whose rambling World’s Fair Hotel, just a short streetcar ride away, housed windowless rooms, a gas chamber, secret chutes, and a basement crematory … Gripping drama, captured with a reporter’s nose for a good story and a novelist’s flair for telling it.
