Review: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

3 stars. I went into this totally blind, except knowing that it's considered a classic and gives off potent Southern Gothic vibes. I vaguely remembered it as a nonfiction book, BUT THEN I started reading it, and 25% of the way in was like ... there's no way this is nonfiction. BUT THEN I looked it up to confirm, and lo and behold, apparently this IS nonfiction. BUT THEN I read on Wikipedia (all hail) that the author did admit - as he eventually does in his afterword - to fabricating some characters and events to make the book read better.

And wow, it worked. This book reads like a smooth, buttery biscuit. Crunchy, sweet, and well-baked with the harsh aftertaste of racism. Gotta love the American South. Midnight is one hundred percent too good to be true, but I wouldn't be surprised if MOST of it did happen - just not in the neat and tidy way the story is written. I've met people who embody certain stereotypes from all over the country, and not one of them fit THAT perfectly into the mold. I'm quite sure the author met these folks and then conveniently turned them into storybook characters, which is neither here nor there.

Anyway, Midnight is a *cough cough* nonfiction novel about that time an established antiques dealer shot and killed his young male lover in his famous historic mansion. The core story itself, which details the crime, the trial and the town's reaction, is surrounded and sandwiched by captivating vignettes about Savannah, Georgia. Every little detail is fascinating from a location perspective and a people perspective, providing an insider view of Savannah's secrets and scandals.

Just a quick note: the events captured in this book happened recently. At times I caught myself assuming it all went down a century or more ago, thanks to some seriously ignorant, racist, sexist, homophobic, intolerant attitudes. But no, my parents were super alive when this happened - in fact, Jim Williams died a year to the day before I was born. While this is astounding but not surprising, it actually makes me hopeful that in like what - thirty, forty years? We'll have progressed even further, even in the South.

Midnight is one part anthropological study, one part courtroom drama, one part portrait of a stubborn city in America. I wouldn't exactly call it true crime, though that may be because I'm used to the graphic true crime content explosion of the last five years. Anyway, it has all the things I love. And the ending - the final few paragraphs - really got me. I'm glad this story was told, and I hope others like it will be told - in words rather than crime scene photos, in whispers rather than shouts.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil on: Amazon | Bookshop.org | Goodreads