Harold Schechter

#2

Even as a child in Gilmanton, New Hampshire, Herman Mudgett was considered a lad with a future, a boy who professed filial devotion while secretly fantasizing his parents' deaths. By age eleven he was conducting secret experiments on small animals and strays, becoming skilled at disabling his subjects without killing them. In 1886 he appeared in the Chicago suburb of Englewood, Illinois, and introduced himself as Dr. H. H. Holmes to the wife of the ailing owner of Holton's drugstore. He was hired on the spot, and under his management the store prospered. But when Holmes's attempt to purchase the drugstore from Mrs. Holton went sour, and she sued him, she inexplicably disappeared - never to be seen or heard from again. As Jack the Ripper was terrorizing London, Holmes was building his infamous "Castle," a grandiose residence and veritable fortress bristling with battlements and turrets. He hired and fired a succession of workmen to build the castle, thus eliminating witnesses to its secrets: a labyrinth of trapdoors, winding passageways, dark dead-end halls, stairways to nowhere, bedchambers fitted with peepholes and asphyxiating gas pipes, soundproof vaults and torture chambers, greased chutes large enough to send human bodies from the living quarters to a cellar equipped with acid vats, a crematorium, a dissecting table, and cases full of gleaming surgical tools. Alternately donning the mantles of doctor, druggist and inventor, Holmes was also a get-rich-quick schemer and bigamist, with three wives and innumerable lovers - at least one of whom ended up a prize skeletal specimen, sold to a medical college for nearly two hundred dollars. But his increasing audacity and carelessness during his reign of terror led to his discovery and to "The Trial of the Century," in which Holmes finally confessed to twenty-seven murders. While he later recanted - maintaining his innocence until his final breath - he had already achieved immortality as the most monstrous criminal of his day.

#3

1994

In his first novel since the classic Falling Angel, William Hjortsberg returns to the labyrinthine world of mystery and horrific murder he has made uniquely his own. Set in 1920s New York City, at the dawn of the Jazz Age, Nevermore opens with the shocking discovery of a brutal double murder in a Hell's Kitchen tenement. The seemingly random attack baffles the police, but as the murder rate escalates, each new crime more grotesque and elaborate than the last, a shocking pattern takes shape. From the bloodcurdling screams of a one-eyed cat atop a decomposing corpse to a bottle-blond floating in the Hudson River, the unknown killer meticulously recreates grisly scenes out of the pages of Edgar Allan Poe's fiction - crimes that until now existed only in the famed author's macabre imagination. Meanwhile, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the brilliant creator of Sherlock Holmes, while touring America to promote the Spiritualism in which he passionately believes, finds himself plagued by visits from Poe's ghost. His unlikely friend Harry Houdini, the world-renowned magician (who takes personal and professional pleasure in debunking mediums - all the while secretly yearning for contact with the beloved soul of his deceased mother), may in fact be the murderer's true target. Both men fall under the spell of Opal Crosby Fletcher, a beautiful and seductive high-society clairvoyant. Convinced she is the reincarnation of Isis, the ancient Egyptian fertility goddess, she truly appears to have the startling ability to contact inhabitants of the spirit world. Opal knows entirely too much about the nature of the crimes, and she haunts Houdini's dreams in ways that are not entirely spiritual. . As the noose tightens around Houdini, he is bound together with Sir Arthur and Opal in a thrilling knot of maniacal terror. Forces beyond their comprehension conspire to destroy all three, sweeping them into a bloody vortex of vengeance, madness, and death.