Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town [Hardcover]

Elyssa East (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 2009

In rich first-person narrative, Dogtown tells the strange, dark story of a wilderness ghost town that has enthralled artists, writers, and eccentrics—and of a brutal murder committed there. Documenting its history and lore, East explores the possibility that certain landscapes wield their own unique power.

The area known as Dogtown—an isolated colonial ruin and the surrounding 3,600-acre woodland in historic seaside Gloucester, Massachusetts—has always exerted a powerful influence over artists, writers, eccentrics, and nature lovers. But its history is woven through with tales of hallucinations, pirates, ghost sightings, witches, drifters, and violence. A 1984 murder there continues to loom large in Gloucester’s collective psyche: a mentally disturbed local man crushed the skull of a schoolteacher as she walked the woods.

In alternating chapters, East interlaces the story of this murder with Dogtown’s bizarre history. The colonial settlement was a haven for former slaves, prostitutes, and witches until it was abandoned 180 years ago. Since then, Dogtown has inspired various people, including a millionaire who carved Protestant precepts into its boulders; the Modernist painter Marsden Hartley, whom Dogtown saved from a crippling depression; the drug-addled poet Charles Olson; a coven of witches that still holds ceremonies there today; and the murderer, who spent much of his life in Dogtown’s woods.

The murder tapped a vein of thinking that has quietly endured in Gloucester for centuries: some people rallied around Dogtown protectively, but others blamed it for the tragedy.

In luminous, insightful prose, Dogtown tells an evocative tale of a community both haunted and bound together by its love of this strange, forgotten place and its denizens.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

[Signature]Reviewed by Joyce Carol OatesThis is a work of narrative nonfiction in which I attempt to tell the story of a landscape—Gloucester, Massachusetts's Dogtown. The author's succinct description of her fascinating, richly detailed and remarkably evocative exploration of a long-deserted colonial village amid a 3,600-acre woodland doesn't do justice to the quirky originality of Dogtown. Part history of a most unusual region; part commentary on the art of the American Modernist painter Marsden Hartley; part murder mystery/true crime police procedural; and part memoir, East's first book is likely to appeal to a varied audience for whom Dogtown, Mass., is utterly unknown.East was initially drawn to Dogtown through the landscape paintings of Hartley—a gifted and undervalued contemporary of Georgia O'Keeffe, Arthur Dove and John Marin. Led to investigate the landscape Hartley painted, East soon finds herself, like the protagonist of a mystery, ever more deeply involved with the colonial ruin—is it a place of mystical wonder, or is it an accursed landscape? In colonial times, Dogtown was a marginal area of Gloucester said to be a haven for former slaves, prostitutes and witches; in the 20th century, it was largely abandoned and became a sort of uncharted place where, in a notorious 1984 incident, a mentally deranged sex offender murdered a young woman teacher in the woods.East is thorough in her descriptions of the attractive young victim and the loathsome murderer—a devastating portrait of the type of predator of whom it's said he would never hurt anyone. Though the true crime chapters—which alternate with chapters presenting the tangled history of Dogtown—are inevitably more interesting, East gracefully integrates her various themes into a coherent and mesmerizing whole. In her admiration for Hartley, East kindles in the reader a wish to see his works, as well as the allegedly mystical landscape that inspired them; it would have been a good idea to include color plates of some of Hartley's work, juxtaposed with the landscapes. Also, the true crime chapters—written with appalled compassion—and the detailed portraits of individuals involved—the murderer, the victim, the victim's husband and his family, several police officers—would benefit from photographs as well. Late in Dogtown, as if the author's inventiveness were flagging and her material running thin, there are digressions into local politics that will be of limited interest.Dogtown is surprisingly spare in personal information. We learn only a few facts about the engaging young writer whose life was so changed when she first saw Hartley's paintings that, five years later, she was led to the adventure of Dogtown, which would involve her for 10 years. This is most unusually self-effacing, particularly in our rabidly confessional times. Some readers will appreciate the author's vanishing into her subject, which is certainly strong enough to stand alone, while others might feel an absence in this evocation of, as Hartley described it, one of these strange wild places... where the chemistry of the universe is too busy realizing itself.Joyce Carol Oates's latest novel is Little Bird of Heaven (HarperCollins/Ecco).
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From Booklist

Adjacent to the seaport of Gloucester, Massachusetts, lies a forested tract of several square miles known as Dogtown. Initially drawn to the area by her interest in modernist painter Marsden Hartley, who depicted landscapes of Dogtown in the 1930s, East discovered that stories about the place extend back to colonial times. In lissome prose, East creates a remarkable depiction of the town that flexibly mixes history, character sketches, and personal observations. Everything East encounters in and about Dogtown seems to warn against, if not repel, human presence; a feeling of intruding upon a haunted place infuses her description of it. Ruins jut from Dogtown’s undergrowth—erratic boulders abandoned by the Ice Age, the wreck of a settlement, modern-day trash, and the scene of a 1984 murder. That’s when a local eccentric bludgeoned a woman to death. That in the backgrounds of both murderer and victim there were starkly contrasting attractions to the woods of Dogtown provokes East’s most acute insights into what the area means to people. An artfully wrought, absorbing debut. --Gilbert Taylor

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Free Press; First Edition edition (December 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416587047
• ISBN-13: 978-1416587040
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (53 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #769,245 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not your typical walk in the woods, December 8, 2009

By 

jd103 (Yellowstone) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

About 35 years ago, I got excited to hear Harry Chapin singing about (broadly speaking) my part of the world:

"Up in Massachusetts there's a little spit of land
The men who make the maps, yes, they call the place Cape Ann
The men who do the fishing call it Gloucester Harbor Sound
But the women left behind, they call the place Dogtown"
Heads & Tales

So when I got this book, one of the first things I did was check the index and found that the song was mentioned. Next, I looked up Thoreau and found that his journal entry about the area was quoted.

When I actually started reading, I soon realized that this is indeed a book with a little of whatever you're looking for. But contrary to the song lyric, one of the main threads of this book involves a man left behind, not by a ship lost at sea but by a brutal murder in Dogtown. Along with walks on the trails of Dogtown, you'll also find explorations of the area's history from colonists to witches to pirates, and the reactions of an artist and a poet and the author to this strange area of land.

It's strange not only because it's an undeveloped area of land near a major city (not just undeveloped--in many cases it's not even known who if anyone owns the land) or because of the boulders engraved with odd phrases, but because many people feel something unusual about the place. I have to admit I'm one of them. It was the early 90s before I first hiked Dogtown, a few years after the murder featured in the book which I didn't know about at the time. I saw the boulders, and the broken Whale's Jaw, and got lost on the many trails. Most of all, I felt a sense of claustrophobia, an oddness which I haven't felt in any other place I've hiked. It wasn't a pleasant feeling and in future visits to the area, I stuck to walking beside the ocean in neighboring Rockport.

I enjoyed the book very much, especially some pages near the end featuring a couple old timers who care about Dogtown much more than most people, but in very different ways--one wants the area left completely wild while the other wants the trails heavily maintained and well marked (I recognized the name of the second man and believe I was once part of a group hike he led). I do agree with some reviewers that the book perhaps includes a few too many topics, but given the author's tendency to draw parallels among events, I did wonder if the book's structure was intended to reflect the meandering trails of the area.

Edited to add that after reading the review in the NY Times and some here claiming that the book would be better if it focused on the crime and eliminated many of the other aspects, I couldn't disagree more. It might well have been a more popular book, but it would have been a much lesser book. That might seem contradictory to my last paragraph, but an example of what I had in mind was a page about pirates hundreds of years ago, not the present day issues affecting Dogtown mentioned in the Times review which I considered some of the most interesting parts of the book.

13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars American History Buffs and Murder Mystery Lovers Will Delight, December 8, 2009

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Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town (Hardcover)

Who doesn't love a ghost story? Remember telling creepy tales around the campfire, deep in the woods, shivering with fear while eerie screeches and spooky sounds emanated out of the shadows of the night? Those were myths and legends designed to leave listeners glancing over their shoulders with a growing unease or cause a sleepless night. But Dogtown, an abandoned colonial community in Massachusetts' Cape Ann area, is a real place, one that many have claimed is haunted. It has a past rich in scary stories, witches and warlocks, ghost sightings, and general hair-raising, spine-tingling malaise among its visitors. And it also has a real-life bogeyman in its sinister history and has now become a genuine ghost town.

As far back as anyone can remember, Dogtown has lured famous writers, poets, painters and sculptors --- all drawn there by its unique countryside and its strange residents. One such artist's undertaking was to carve huge boulders heralding life lessons and tidings such as "Be on time" or simply "Courage." The Dogtown people prided themselves on their oddity; you might even say they reveled in it. At least, until one man carried his peculiarity too far, descending into perversion, and killed not only a well-loved local woman but also Dogtown's sense of uneasy peace.

The same reasons that drew previous authors to explore Dogtown drew Elyssa East to the community as well. She felt an urge to see what had so entranced a man named Marsden Hartley to create a series of paintings of its distinctive landscape. But what she discovered was Dogtown's dark past, one that involved Peter Hodgkins. Something made Peter different from everyone else; his tastes leaned toward deviance, a proclivity that might have triggered alarms had the right people been paying attention. The townsfolk simply laid it off to Peter's weirdness, looking the other way when he repeatedly exposed himself to women, ultimately turning alarmingly physical. Unfortunately, the legal rebuke was always too soft, allowing Peter back on the streets with not much more than a slap on the wrist.

So it was that, one lovely summer morning, schoolteacher Anne Natti was walking through the woods with her dog. A chance encounter with Hodgkins sealed her fate, leaving her bruised, bloody, with a caved-in head, injuries that brought about a slow, painful death.

As Elyssa East guides us through Ann's last day and her killer's trial, she also guides us through Dogtown's colorful history, which includes more than just stories of witches and demons and pirates lurking in the nearby waters as regular folks worked to build a life on the inhospitable peninsula. Not all comers to Dogtown had a negative experience, though. Some were seduced by a sort of hopeful awe, a compulsion to feel its aura. A mystery surrounded the twisted trees and shrubs, tempting imaginations and, fortunately, imaginations gave way to poems, paintings and books.

DOGTOWN is a beautifully written account of the community's magnetism, its repulsion and the inexplicable pull it possesses. American History buffs and murder mystery lovers will delight in this alluring book.

--- Reviewed by Kate Ayers

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars a slog through Dogtown, March 22, 2010

By 

C. P. Anderson (Charlotte, NC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town (Hardcover)

Dogtown is an abandoned area just outside Gloucester, Mass. It has some colonial-era cellar holes, some odd rock formations, and some associations with a minor painter (Marsden Hartley) and a minor poet (Charles Olson).

The book is basically the author's attempt to tie these various strands together, along with a murder that occurred there in 1984. It's a good device for creating suspense (switching from one story line to the other, ending each with a little something hanging in the air), but unfortunately none of these stories amount to much of anything in the end. The crime story is not bad, but the others just kind of peter out. East tries to tie them all together throughout and to wrap them up neatly at the end, but it's all rather forced. I'm not sure she knew where any of this was going to go (except perhaps for the crime story) until she started to write it.

Another thing that was rather forced was East's attempt at giving Dogtown a real sense of place. Based on the number of artists and authors who have had some interest in Dogtown over the years, there does seem to be something there. This didn't ever really come across to me in the book though. Lots of stating, but very little demonstrating.

I did like the author's style, though she does tend to chew on something ad nauseum. There are also little vignettes and long asides that seem beside the point and do very little to keep any of the stories in motion. To tell the truth, the stories would have made much better magazine articles. Altogether, those might have amounted to 20-some pages, instead of the 250 that the reader is forced to slog through.