The Wilderness of Ruin - by Roseanne Montillo (Paperback)

About the Book

Originally published in hardcover in 2015.

Book Synopsis

"A captivating tale of depravity in the Athens of America." --Mitchell Zuckoff, author of the New York Times bestsellers Lost in Shangri-La and Frozen in Time

In late nineteenth-century Boston, home to Herman Melville and Oliver Wendell Holmes, a serial killer preying on children is running loose in the city--a wilderness of ruin caused by the Great Fire of 1872--in this literary historical crime thriller reminiscent of The Devil in the White City.

In the early 1870s, local children begin disappearing from the working-class neighborhoods of Boston. Several return home bloody and bruised after being tortured, while others never come back.

With the city on edge, authorities believe the abductions are the handiwork of a psychopath, until they discover that their killer--fourteen-year-old Jesse Pomeroy--is barely older than his victims. The criminal investigation that follows sparks a debate among the world's most revered medical minds, and will have a decades-long impact on the judicial system and medical consciousness.

The Wilderness of Ruin is a riveting tale of gruesome murder and depravity. At its heart is a great American city divided by class--a chasm that widens in the aftermath of the Great Fire of 1872. Roseanne Montillo brings Gilded Age Boston to glorious life--from the genteel cobblestone streets of Beacon Hill to the squalid, overcrowded tenements of Southie. Here, too, is the writer Herman Melville. Enthralled by the child killer's case, he enlists physician Oliver Wendell Holmes to help him understand how it might relate to his own mental instability.

With verve and historical detail, Roseanne Montillo explores this case that reverberated through all of Boston society in order to help us understand our modern hunger for the prurient and sensational.

The Wilderness of Ruin features more than a dozen black-and-white photographs.

From the Back Cover

"Supremely creepy. . . . As thrilling as it is disturbing." --Boston Globe

In 1871, young children were disappearing from Boston's working-class neighborhoods. The few who returned told desperate tales of being taken to the woods and tortured by a boy not much older than themselves. The police were skeptical--these children were from poor families, so their testimony was easily discounted. And after the Great Boston Fire of 1872 reduced much of downtown to rubble, the city had more pressing concerns. Finally, when the police apprehended Jesse Pomeroy for the crimes, he, like any twelve-year-old, was sent off to reform school. Little thought was given to the danger he might pose to society, despite victims' chilling reports of this affectless Boy Torturer.

Sixteen months later, Jesse was released in the care of his mother, and within months a ten-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy went missing, their mutilated bodies later discovered by police. This set off a frantic hunt for Pomeroy, who was now proclaimed America's youngest serial killer. When he was captured and brought to trial, his case transfixed the nation, and two public figures--Herman Melville and Oliver Wendell Holmes--each probed the depths of Pomeroy's character in a search for the meaning behind his madness.

Roseanne Montillo takes us inside those harrowing years, as a city reeling from great disaster reckoned with the moral quandaries posed by Pomeroy's spree.

Review Quotes

"A dramatically told history of murder, madness, and urban growing pains." - Shelf Awareness
"A riveting true-crime tale that rivals anything writers in the 21st century could concoct. ... [Montillo is] a masterly storyteller." - Publishers Weekly
"A lively, evocative reinvigoration of Boston's Gilded Age. ... Cinematic. ... A chillingly drawn, expertly researched slice of grim Boston history." - Kirkus Reviews
"The Wilderness of Ruin is a captivating tale of depravity in the Athens of America. Roseanne Montillo masterfully conjures a lost Boston where a teen-age 'demon' hunts children and the city itself is a tinderbox ripe for the flames." - Mitchell Zuckoff, author of the New York Times bestsellers Lost in Shangri-La and Frozen in Time
"Supremely creepy. ... As thrilling as it is disturbing." - Boston Globe
"A compulsively fascinating and chilling read on the nature of evil." - Minneapolis Star Tribune
"A delicious and enticing journey into the origins of a masterpiece." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A haunting picture of an era in which science and the arts overlapped, a perfect storm in which inspiration for "Frankenstein" could strike. Like a bolt of lightning." - Washington Post
"Montillo never loses sight of the fact that it was Mary Shelley's imagination that sewed the pieces together - and provided the vital spark that keeps the tale alive nearly two centuries on." - New Scientist
"With a flair for animating historical detail and an inner compass that orients toward the darker corners of life, Roseanne Montillo seats us close enough to an inferno to singe our eyelashes. Then, shifting through its ashes, she resurrects a serial killer, a literary circle obsessed with madness, and a cast of real-life urchins straight out of Dickens. The Wilderness of Ruin is improper Boston at its most vivid." - Vicki Croke, author of the New York Times bestseller Elephant Company
Praise for The Lady and Her Monsters: "Her narrative... rattles enjoyably through a lurid and restless landscape. ... Equally a literary and a scientific endeavor." - Wall Street Journal
"Montillo achieves a freshness through her lively narrative approach and a fascination with long-ago science and its ethics that sparks across the pages." - New York Times Book Review
"With a flair for both drama and detail, Montillo breathes her own kind of life into the story of the men determined to discover its very elements." - Discover