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American fire : love, arson, and life in a vanishing land

Author

Hesse, Monica, author.

Title

American fire : love, arson, and life in a vanishing land / Monica Hesse.

Format

Book

Edition

First edition.

Published

New York, N.Y. : Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, [2017]

Description

255 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 25 cm

Contents

• "Charge that line!"
• "The South starts here"
• "Orange in the sky"
• Charlie
• Monomanie incendiaire
• Tonya
• "Like a ghost"
• "Tell us what you know about that"
• Charlie and Tonya
• Schrödinger's evidence
• The eastern shore arsonist hunters
• "I've seen enough ass to know"
• "Like hell was coming up through the ground"
• Tonya and Charlie
• "They're not hunters at all"
• "I didn't light them all"
• "Someday they'll go down together"
• "Everybody has a reason for why they do things in life"
• "I can't tell you something I don't know"
• "Midnight without makeup"
• The broken things
• "Time to wake up"
• Burned
• "We'd done it before"
• "They came out of everywhere"
• "Moral turpitude"
• What happened next
• "It's over"

Summary

Documents the trial of a man charged with dozens of counts of arson in a rural Virginia county, sharing insight into his struggles with addiction, his relationship with his accomplice girlfriend, and the impact of the fires on their community. "The arsons started on a cold November midnight and didn't stop for months. Night after night, the people of Accomack County waited to see which building would burn down next, regarding each other at first with compassion, and later suspicion. Vigilante groups sprang up, patrolling the rural Virginia coast with cameras and camouflage. Volunteer firefighters slept at their stations. The arsonist seemed to target abandoned buildings, but local police were stretched too thin to surveil them all. Accomack was desolate--there were hundreds of abandoned buildings. And by the dozen they were burning. The culprit, and the path that led to these crimes, is a story of twenty-first century America....Though it's hard to believe today, one hundred years ago Accomack was the richest rural county in the nation. Slowly it's been drained of its industry--agriculture--as well as its wealth and population. In an already remote region, limited employment options offer little in the way of opportunity. A mesmerizing and crucial panorama with nationwide implications, American Fire asks what happens when a community gets left behind. Hesse brings to life the Eastern Shore and its inhabitants, battling a punishing economy and increasingly terrified by a string of fires they could not explain. The result evokes the soul of rural America--a land half gutted before the fires even began." -- provided by publisher.

Subject headings

Arson--Virginia--Accomack County. Rural crimes--Virginia--Accomack County. Accomack County (Va.)--Economic conditions. Accomack County (Va.)--Rural conditions. Accomack County (Va.)--Social conditions.

ISBN

9781631490514 1631490516