Why read Love & Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere?

Book cover of Love & Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere

Book description

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…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Love & Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Geoffrey C. Fuller

Author

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…

From Geoffrey's list on The best books on crime exploring more than the crime.