Why am I passionate about this?
I’m always intrigued by certain kinds of crime stories, but usually not by the crimes themselves. Straightforward whodunits bore me, and simplistic retellings of the hero myth just strike me as wrong. About thirty years ago, I began to wonder why—which crime stories intrigue me and which seem more like exercises in voyeurism. Turns out the stories I really get into wrap me in previously unseen worlds. They offer a fresh take, bring up unexpected considerations, present a new way to view the crime, or demonstrate why what I’d always thought was mistaken or insufficient. Such books present the crime, but contain much more than the crime.
Geoffrey's book list on crime exploring more than the crime
Why did Geoffrey love this book?
I thought Love & Terror was a book about a killing in Chadron, Nebraska, which was correct. . . sort of. Ballantine’s sparkling prose and grim compassion hooked me immediately. The book does examine a death—suicide? murder?—but we don’t meet the victim, Steven Haataja, until page 62.
Ballantine drives past the shuffling Haataja the night before his death and tells us Haataja “limped slightly from a recently broken hip. If I’d known what was going to happen to him, I would have run him over . . . hard enough to break his other hip, put him back in his wheelchair,” in order to prevent his death.
When I first read Love & Terror, I learned crime doesn’t need to be the center of a true crime.
1 author picked Love & Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Fans of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil will embrace Poe Ballantine's Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere.
Poe Ballantine's "Free Rent at the Totalitarian Hotel" included in Best American Essays 2013, and for well over twenty years, Poe Ballantine traveled America, taking odd jobs, living in small rooms, trying to make a living as a writer. At age 46, he finally settled with his Mexican immigrant wife in Chadron, Nebraska, where they had a son who was red-flagged as autistic. Poe published four books about his…