Month: March 2004

The Devil in the White City

A Christmas present from A., The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larson, is not the sort of book that I usually read. It’s about the construction of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and its attendant success. It’s a miraculous story. It’s almost unbelievable the logistical and architectural nightmare that Daniel Burnham had to overcome. It’s inspiring, the ingenuity and gumption described in the book. At the time, the World’s Fair in Chicago was very important. It was said that there were three years that would live on in American history 1776, 1861 and 1893.

There’s even a bit of family history associated with the Fair.

Interwoven with this, another barely believable story, is a recounting of the nefarious exploits of H.H. Holmes, America’s first serial killer. It’s amazing. It reads like a really bad slasher novel. (I’m surprised that USA hasn’t made a tv-movie about this… Maybe they have!?!?) Basically, Holmes, whose real name is Mudgett, constructs a building, inside of which is some kind of sound-proofed death chamber, wherein he lured young women and gassed them to death. Once safely dead, he then dissected and mutilated their bodies, after which he donated their skeletons “to science”.

It’s unreal. Here’s what the author has to say about it:

I started doing some research, and I came across the serial killer in this book, Dr. H. H. Holmes. I immediately dismissed him because he was so over-the-top bad, so luridly outrageous. I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to do a slasher book. It crossed the line into murder-porn.

The book is very interesting, but I didn’t really care for the style in which it was written. I’m not sure what it was that bothered me about it. Maybe I’m just not used to reading historical non-fiction. I think, if anything, it had more to with the way in which the story was presented. It seemed a bit haphazard. Or maybe it was too much of a stretch to find some kind of thematic link between the World’s Fair and this serial murderer.

There’s a nice panoramic photo of the Fair here, as well as more information about Holmes.

UPDATE: So, I found this graphic novel about HH Holmes.

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a fun interview with Alan Moore

Ever since reading, From Hell, I’ve been very impressed with everything that Alan Moore has written. His writing in the past has been (as far as I know) exclusively in the comics field, but he has written a novel, which has just come out, called Voice of Fire. It sounds very cool:
Alan Moore Interview

An excerpt (to whet your appetite, perhaps):
Most people in Britain know Northampton as a vague blur on the M-1 Motorway between London and Birmingham and yet, when I started to think about writing a book about the town, I began to research its history and found enough evidence, to at least convince me, that Northampton is, actually, the center of the entire cosmos.

text adventure games

Long long ago, when I had my trusty old Commodore 64 plugging away, running this, that and the other, one type of game which I was quite enamored with was the text adventure game. One of my very favorite games was the game (based on Douglas Adams’ book) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which you can play online here! Getting the babel fish into my ear was an achievement that I relished immensely…

Once Castle Wolfenstein came out, though, the text adventure games (and my C-64) suddenly seemed a little less interesting. I always missed those text adventure games though.

Apparently, while I wasn’t looking, some folks got together and decided to start creating this form of game again, only now they’re calling it “Interactive Fiction”. Doesn’t matter to me what they call it, I’m just happy to see people doing this again. There’s some basic information here: Magic Words: Interactive Fiction in the 21st Century and you can download a bunch of recommended games here.

Hurray for past enthusiasms!