Customer Reviews

The Torture Doctor

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Meet Herman Mudgett...This guy was seriously a nut job. And what was hard for me to grasp was the fact that he was so calm and collected in everyday life you never would have expected it. Completely jammed full of information on one of the first serial killers in the US (Late 1800's). It tells about the "Castle" he built with torture chambers and secret passages, his forms of torture and eventually murder. With single women coming to Chicago for jobs, and the Worlds Fair drawing so many people he had all the victims he could ever want. While completely gross, it is none-the-less, a riveting read. Highly recomended.

Very well organized and written account of the life of Herman W. Mudgett, alias Dr. H. H. Holmes, who is credited with as many as 300 murders in the late 1800s. Most of those murders took place in his "torture castle" in Chicago. This book, in this reader's
humble opinion, is better organized and livelier than Harold Schecter's later work, DEPRAVED.

The Devil in the white City does not have enough information, for any one who only wants to know about the Holmes Case. The best books to buy is Depraved and the Torture Doctor. I highly recommend these books!!!!!!!

I was so excited to read the torture doctor because I read other reviews saying that he was so messed up and he tortured his victims and so on and so forth. What I found out when I got to the end of this book was that he was just another killer who murdered people. He did not torture them whatsoever. I was hoping to read a novel that would disgust me by the way he killed his victims but it didn't. This book is about the life of Herman W. Mudgett, alias Dr. H. H. Holmes and about his murder spree throughout his life. So, he killed people, mostly for their money, nothing more. He did this all in a calm manner which is not that strange considering most serial killers have that kind of personality. Everything in this book was boring and read like a dictionary. I was hoping to read about a man who tortured victims in his "castle" but this book was not like that at all. All it talked about was him and his history, and I was so bored by it. They didn't talk at all about the murders. They did mention some but none of them were at all that gruesome. He was just money hungry and that resulted in murder. I mean this guy was absolutely a nut case but I don't know why they call him the torture doctor when he did not even torture his victims. Maybe a little bit of torture went on but that doesn't give the right to label him as a the torture doctor. I was so bored I ended up skimming most of it until I got to interesting parts. I only recommend this book if you like to know the history of Herman W. Mudgett and his life. To tell you the truth most of this book was about the trial of Herman and the detectives looking for the two bodies of Mrs. Pitzles children. Don't expect to find anything that disturbing in this book, or any torture.