Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town Book

There was such a wealth of material here, but sadly it was not well-handled by the author. In the hands of a better writer (someone like Richard Preston, for example), this had the potential to be a great book, but as it was, it felt naive and clumsy and overly self-referential. Disappointing.

One last note on this book: I do think that some places are magnets for badness, although I don't know why. Is it supernatural? Is it that once a place gets a reputation, it attracts the wrong kind of people? Is it simple geography, i.e. that densely wooded areas provide better cover for people who want to do nasty things? I don't know, but I do think that my hometown is one of these places, a kind of matrix of vileness. From the Wikipedia entry on serial killer Ed Kemper: "At the time of Kemper's murder spree in Santa Cruz, another serial killer named Herbert Mullin was also active, earning the small California town the title of 'Murder Capital Of The World.' Also adding to the college town's infamy was the fact that Kemper's and Mullin's crimes were preceded three years earlier by multiple murders committed by John Linley Frazier, who murdered Santa Cruz eye surgeon Victor Ohta and his family. Kemper and Mullin were briefly held in adjoining cells, with the former angrily accusing the latter of stealing his body-dumping sites." That was in the 1970s, and many other terrible things have happened since then in this little town of 30,000. It's a creepy place, a frightening place (I feel safer walking around borderline neighborhoods in New York City than I do in downtown Santa Cruz) and one day I might write a book about it.