The Wilderness of Ruin

January 19, 2015
Delving deep into the history of Boston circa the 19th century, Montillo (The Lady and Her Monsters) unearths a riveting true-crime tale that rivals anything writers in the 21st century could concoct. Jesse Harding Pomeroy, an adolescent from a deeply troubled family, earns notoriety in working-class Boston and surrounding towns by kidnapping and torturing young boys. The sensational journalism of the period soon turns him into a subject of grotesque fascination in the city and beyond. After Jesse is apprehended by court order and sent off to reform school, his mother secures a commutation that returns the teenager to the city, with monstrous results. A masterly storyteller, Montillo skillfully evokes the poor and patrician neighborhoods that served as a backdrop for the crimes, particularly after the 1872 fire that ravaged the city center. The police investigations that tracked down Jesse are stunning in their similarity to modern-day sleuthing. Alongside the graphic, disturbing details of Pomeroy’s crimes, Montillo chronicles the contemporary fascination with mental illness by writers such as Herman Melville, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and other paragons of 19th-century Boston. A host of doctors and lawyers also figure prominently in these pages, as they all try to understand what drove a young boy to commit horrific crimes that gripped a city for decades. B&w illus. Agent: Rob Weisbach, Rob Weisbach Creative Management.

February 1, 2015

In the early 1870s, a mentally disabled teenager named Jesse Pomeroy preyed on children in and around Boston, capturing, torturing, and in a few cases killing his victims. Montillo (The Lady and Her Monsters) tells his story, with all the grisly details, in this fascinating book. Pomeroy's crimes captured public attention well beyond Boston and led to increased debate about the appropriate punishment and treatment for mentally ill criminals. The gruesome tale is supplemented by frequent diversions into Boston history, including an account of the fire that swept the city in 1872, a chronicle of prisons in the region, and a sketch of the noted physician Oliver Wendell Holmes. These asides combine to give an effective picture of the metropolis and its influential citizens and institutions in the decades following the Civil War. The longest sections, outside of those on Pomeroy, are devoted to novelist Herman Melville, who had his own struggles with mental illness, both in his characters and in himself. Montillo does not draw a very compelling parallel between Melville and Pomeroy, but the passages about the author of Moby-Dick are interesting nonetheless. VERDICT Recommended for readers who enjoy American history, especially those interested in Boston or the history of crime and punishment. [See Prepub Alert, 9/14/14.]--Nicholas Graham, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

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