The Devil in the White City

by Erik Larson

Rating: *****

The World’s Columbian Exposition, hosted by Chicago in 1893 and known as the Chicago World’s Fair, was a monumental feat of architecture, engineering, and design, showcasing not only art, antiquities, and cultural exhibits but also innovative, ground-breaking ideas and technologies of the late-Victorian age.

However, the wonders of “The White City,” as the fair was additionally named due to the buildings being painted white, came at a tremendous mental, physical, and often financial cost to those involved, chief of whom was the leading architect, Daniel H. Burnham.

Many sought to capitalize on the Fair’s popularity, but none more so than H.H. Holmes, a charismatic doctor who decided to open a hotel above his pharmacy close to The White City. But, the ‘World’s Fair Hotel’ was no ordinary boarding house as Holmes equipped it with gas chambers, furnaces, operating/torture rooms, and burial grounds in the basement…

Elegant, illuminating, and entertaining, The Devil in the White City can be viewed in literary terms as an achievement almost as colossal as the Fair itself. Larson painstakingly and scrupulously recreates every aspect, challenge, and hurdle (and they are multitudinous) from inception to completion, and beyond.

But it’s through Larson’s meticulous rendering of the individuals responsible for realizing this insanely ambitious project that this towering work of non-fiction is brought to rich, engrossing life. Larson paints Burnham and his visionary cohorts so vividly, from physical appearances with all their nuanced, distinguishing quirks, and reveals their internal motivations and innermost desires.

Primarily, the focus is on Burnham, but as the World’s Fair project spins, often perilously out of control, the cast list swells and becomes littered with illustrious figures of the age and, additionally, those who would, in time, make a defining mark in their chosen field, such as George Ferris Jr., and Sol Bloom.  

A man who certainly leaves a notorious legacy is H.H. Holmes, or Herman Mudgett to give him his birth name. Con artist, swindler, and serial killer of predominantly, but not exclusively, young women.

Larson runs Burnham’s and Holmes’s stories concurrently, chapters interleave with both men’s trajectories, and they can be seen to intriguingly color the narrative from light to dark and back again, sub-textually mirroring the White City/Black City contrast between the Fair and Chicago.

Interestingly, as Larson immerses the reader into Burnham’s life, his writing is slightly more elaborate, carefully embroidered with intimate detail and emotion. As the fair consumes Burnham and those around him, especially the landscape architect, Frederic Law Olmsted, the reader experiences the mind-blowing array of setbacks, difficulties, factional squabbling, and power politics with nerve-shredding immediacy due to Larson’s fastidious research and gorgeously ornamented prose.

Holmes’s narrative reads differently. It’s finer, brisker, and with greater, singular focus, which is understandable. Although chillingly, comprehensively descriptive, there is an element of emotional detachment that handsomely suits the subject, but sometimes detracts from the horrifying intensity of his actions. However, as the body count ratchets up and suspicions can no longer be silenced, Holmes’s chapters read with the grip of an unputdownable thriller.

Nonetheless, it could be argued that there are two books here. Occasionally, the pendulum shift between Holmes and Burnham breaks momentum. Toward the end, the Fair takes precedence; it becomes completely absorbing, taking on a fantastical, otherworldly mantle, and Holmes’s heinous activities are a touch diluted.

Indeed, the Fair emerges from its nascent wreckage to become fully realized as a character in its own right, together with the “black” city that hosted it.  Larson paints 1890s Chicago in steaming, visceral colors, an adroit, sinuous citadel, laden with vice and opportunity.

Whilst the scale and scope of the Fair are justly awe-inspiring and quite breathtaking, its impact is equally remarkable, and its aftermath hauntingly poignant. Larson’s closing chapters, exploring the fate of the Fair and that of its dramatis personae, are riveting and shiver with an eerie tingle.

Larson doesn’t just tell the reader about the World’s Fair of 1893 in The Devil in the White City; he takes them there.  Highly recommended.

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