This is a small gem of a book, based upon a true event, a dance hall fire that devastated the town of West Plain MO in 1929, in which a number of the town's young people perished, and the cause of the fire has never been satisfactorily explained in all the years since.
Woodrell's family has been resident in the area for many years, and his grandmother did indeed work as a maid for a prominent family there at the time of the fire. However Woodrell is not writing a true crime story, but using the event as the starting point for his own tale of the furies unleashed by passion, betrayal, madness and remorse, as unrelenting as any tragedy of Euripedes or Shakespeare.
Click HERE to watch an interview with the author.
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