By Aden Polydoros
As part of my series where I am reviewing the 2022 World Fantasy Award Winner nominees, I wanted to like The City Beautiful. The book had a lot in common with Black Water Sister, the winner of the WFA that year. Both protagonists become haunted by a ghost and they have to help that ghost satisfy their unfinished business. Where Black Water Sister took place in Malaysia and was deeply engrossed in that culture, The City Beautiful takes place in 1893 Chicago during the World Fair. I was reminded of Devil in the White City because The City Beautiful contained many of the same descriptions of the White City that made Larson’s book a hit. I was not surprised when the author mentioned that he took inspiration from that book and the story of H.H. Holmes, the first American serial killer.
The City Beautiful is a historical fantasy following Alter Rosin, a Romanian Jew who recently emigrated to the United States and is trying to save up enough money to pay for his mother’s and sisters’ passage to America. When Alter’s friend and crush, Yakov, accidentally drowns at the world fair, it becomes apparent to Alter and some of the other members of his community that several young Jewish men have either gone missing or died in accidents recently and the police seem disinclined to investigate further. This puts Alter on his quest to avenge the dybbuk that now inhabits his body and wants his murderer to be put to justice.
The City Beautiful won and was nominated for many awards, so it’s not a bad book, but a book I had trouble getting through the first two-thirds before the story started to take shape and get exciting. The first part of the book contains in-depth descriptions of Chicago at the time, both of its physical appearance and the political and cultural tensions present. Unluckily, I found that this slowed the beginning of the novel for me. I liked that the protagonist was a young gay man in a time when homosexuality was a crime, but that wasn’t the central conflict of the plot.
H.H. Holmes is mentioned in the book but the sensationalized Erik Larson version. H. H. Holmes is credited with up to two hundred murders, but many of the stories only came up after Holmes was captured for fraud. Holmes himself confessed to twenty-seven murders, and some of those people were verifiably alive. Holmes was only convicted of one murder, that of his business partner, and is believed to have reliably killed nine people, but to call him a serial killer is a bit of a stretch. He was a con artist and many of his victims were probably just people who knew too much, were getting in the way of his operations, or where he had some financial gain by their deaths. That doesn’t fit the modern definition of a serial killer, where they are doing it purely for a psychological reason. We don’t call mafia hit-men serial killers, so why should we call Holmes one?
Regardless of the Holmes controversy, which only served as inspiration for Aden’s plot, I think fans of historical fiction would enjoy the level of detail in the book. The City Beautiful is also a grim reminder of the darker parts of American and world history and the persecution that ethnic groups have had to face because of their religion, country, or ancestry.