Safe Return Doubtful

Larson weaves together the triumphal story of the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893 with the gruesome tale of one of America’s first serial killers to create a unique reading experience, the two strands, the White City and pleasure it brought to millions, and the Dark City, with Holmes (the Devil) at large, contrasting so greatly with each other.
Another thing that works very much in Larson’s favour, is that for me at least, though I suspect many others, despite their compelling nature, neither story is particularly well known these days.
Its a combination that fiction would struggle to match; the heroes of the Fair, its architect Daniel Hudson Burnham, George Ferris, with Buffalo Bill Cody on the periphery, the attendance it drew or 700,000+ on Chicago Day, with the evil contained within the ‘World’s Fair Hotel’, that the fiendish Holmes constructed; a horrific gothic mansion with dark passages and staircases going nowhere, soundproofed and airtight rooms, a giant kiln and acid vats…
It really is a reading experience like no other.