You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
liralen 's review for:
American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land
by Monica Hesse
The firefighters of Accomack County would be called out two more times that night. They would be called out eighty-six times total over the next five months. (11)
It's an odd crime, arson. Violent and volatile, but often a literal slow burn, so that the arsonist can be long gone by the time the fire is discovered. The fires in Accomack County were not as bad as they could have been: they were in abandoned buildings, generally, a risk to unused structures more than to human lives. But they strained rural resources and left the town in fear, and the fires just. didn't. stop. coming.
Who was responsible for the fires is never in question in American Fire, but rather the question of motives is explored at length. The book is a love story, but an odd one: a man setting fires for his girlfriend, his girlfriend egging him on and doing legwork and maybe setting fires herself. They didn't get caught and didn't get caught and didn't get caught, and then finally they did, and the physical effort of catching the arsonists (and cleaning up after them) ended, but the rest, the rest got harder.
It's pretty fascinating. The sort of story that could only happen in a rural area, where people know each other and where abandoned structures dot the land and where fire takes on a different tenor than it might in the city. There aren't really satisfying answers, not through a fault of the book but because, ultimately, there are only two people who know the full details, and their stories don't match.
Houses catch on fire; it doesn’t always mean anything. It wasn’t unusual for an abandoned house or two to burn down every year. But this had been three in one night. To everyone involved, it was beginning to feel off. It felt, as Jeff Beall would later describe it to friends, like a person arriving home at the end of the day and finding windows open at his house. One open window, and a person might assume that his spouse had done it to air out the kitchen after a cooking mishap. But if all of the windows were open, it became something else, something eerie and malicious. (25)
It's an odd crime, arson. Violent and volatile, but often a literal slow burn, so that the arsonist can be long gone by the time the fire is discovered. The fires in Accomack County were not as bad as they could have been: they were in abandoned buildings, generally, a risk to unused structures more than to human lives. But they strained rural resources and left the town in fear, and the fires just. didn't. stop. coming.
Who was responsible for the fires is never in question in American Fire, but rather the question of motives is explored at length. The book is a love story, but an odd one: a man setting fires for his girlfriend, his girlfriend egging him on and doing legwork and maybe setting fires herself. They didn't get caught and didn't get caught and didn't get caught, and then finally they did, and the physical effort of catching the arsonists (and cleaning up after them) ended, but the rest, the rest got harder.
It's pretty fascinating. The sort of story that could only happen in a rural area, where people know each other and where abandoned structures dot the land and where fire takes on a different tenor than it might in the city. There aren't really satisfying answers, not through a fault of the book but because, ultimately, there are only two people who know the full details, and their stories don't match.
Houses catch on fire; it doesn’t always mean anything. It wasn’t unusual for an abandoned house or two to burn down every year. But this had been three in one night. To everyone involved, it was beginning to feel off. It felt, as Jeff Beall would later describe it to friends, like a person arriving home at the end of the day and finding windows open at his house. One open window, and a person might assume that his spouse had done it to air out the kitchen after a cooking mishap. But if all of the windows were open, it became something else, something eerie and malicious. (25)