American Fire (Hesse)

American Fire:  Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land
Monica Hesse, 2017
Liveright House
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781631490514

Summary
A breathtaking feat of reportage, American Fire combines procedural with love story, redefining American tragedy for our time.

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. Washington Post reporter Monica Hesse first drove down to the reeling county to cover a hearing for Charlie Smith, a struggling mechanic who upon his capture had promptly pleaded guilty to sixty-seven counts of arson.

But as Charlie’s confession unspooled, it got deeper and weirder. He wasn’t lighting fires alone; his crimes were galvanized by a surprising love story. Over a year of investigating, Hesse uncovered the motives of Charlie and his accomplice, girlfriend Tonya Bundick, a woman of steel-like strength and an inscrutable past. Theirs was a love built on impossibly tight budgets and simple pleasures. They were each other’s inspiration and escape…until they weren’t.

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 (8 pages of illustrations). (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1981-82
• Raised—Normal, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.,A., Bryn Mawr College
• Awards—Edgar Award
• Currently—lives in Maryland


Monica Hesse is the national bestselling author of the true crime love story American Fire and the Edgar Award-winning young adult historical mystery novel Girl in the Blue Coat, which has been translated into a dozen languages and was shortlisted for the American Booksellers Association's Indies Choice Award.

Hesse is a feature writer for the Washington Post, where she has covered royal weddings, dog shows, political campaigns, Academy Awards ceremonies, White House state dinners, and some events that felt like a mixture of all of the above. She has talked about these stories, and other things, on NBC, MSNBC, CNN, CSPAN, FOX and NPR.

She has been a winner of the Society for Feature Journalism's Narrative Storytelling award, and a finalist for a Livingston Award and a James Beard Award. Monica lives in Maryland. with her husband and a brainiac dog (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
[Hesse] has talent to burn.… American Fire is an excellent summer vacation companion. It has all the elements of a lively crime procedural: courtroom drama, forensic trivia, toothsome gossip, vexed sex. It also happens to be a very good portrait of a region in economic decline.… As with S-Town and the best episodes of This American Life, Hesse has managed to wring tension and excitement out of a story with a known ending. One of the most elusive skills in narrative nonfiction, and Hesse has it, is knowing the proper order to arrange your facts. She also superbly conveys the folkways of the Eastern Shore and the disruptive, confusing effect the fires had on its community.… Hesse is a lovely stylist. She has a flair for creating a sense of place. Her character sketches are models of compression, easily collapsible into lockets.
Jennifer Senior - New York Times


The propulsive pleasure of American Fire rests in author Monica Hesse's decision not to force a thing. The book has the brisk diligence of big-city journalism (Hesse writes for the Washington Post) and the languid chattiness of the small town where she lived while researching it.… Hesse gathers the pieces but leaves connections to the reader. When they snap together, the feeling is a bit like gazing upon a blaze you've just lit.
Karl Vick - Time


In American Fire, journalist Monica Hesse faces…quandaries of interpretation, faulty memory and lies, and deals eloquently with the he-said-she-said elements of her story.… What emerges is a vivid depiction of a community that is struggling economically in present-day America, but is rich in its human connections.
Ilana Masad - NPR.org


One of the year's best and most unusual true-crime books.
Randy Dotinga - Christian Science Monitor


Accomack County, Virginia, is utterly unique, but not completely atypical of America’s forgotten places: bypassed by progress on the wrong side of Chesapeake Bay, dotted with houses rotting into literal tinder. Hesse, a Washington Post reporter, finds true-crime gold here.… Hesse forgoes paint-by-numbers suspense, revealing the culprits early on before backing up into their hard-knock love story, their eventual arrest, and perceptive snapshots of an unusually vivid corner of drug-racked Red America.
Boris Katchka - Vulture


American Fire is not only a twisted love story but also a portrait of Accomack County, Virginia, a once-wealthy farming community crumbling from economic hardship.
Nora Horvath - Real Simple


Washington Post reporter Monica Hesse has created a near-masterpiece in American Fire. This true crime book—about a series of arsons on the rural Virginia coast and the Bonnie-and-Clyde duo who committed them—is not just about the crimes themselves, but about the community those crimes affected. It's well-written and eye-opening, and I couldn't put it down. For fans of Hillbilly Elegy and In Cold Blood.
Annie Butterworth Jones - Tallahassee Democrat


Hesse offers sociological insight into a small town…. There is something metaphorical, she notes, about a rural county suffering through a recession being literally burned to the ground. The metaphor becomes belabored…but otherwise this is a page-turning story of love gone off the rails.
Publishers Weekly


Hesse enters the compelling narrative with restraint in probing, essayistic analyses. She tells the story of the fires and of the Eastern Shore and the people she got to know there with an earned familiarity that, at the same time, speaks of the unknowability of a vast, rapidly changing nation.
Booklist


(Starred review.) [C]aptivating.… [T]he surprises arrive in the manner of the arrest, the motives for the fires, and the outcomes of the multiple trials. Throughout, the author offers a nuanced portrait of a way of life…. A true-crime saga that works in every respect.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, please use our talking points to help start a discussion for American Fire … then take off on your own:

1. Talk about the setting of American Fire, the isolated county on the far side of the Chesapeake Bay. How would you describe its economy, its residents, and history? In what way are rural areas like Accomack County tailor-made for arsonists?

2. At one point, the author tells us that the arson aroused suspicions throughout the community, that "people turned on friends and neighbors." Yet the arson also seems to have brought people together. How would you say the arson affected the community?

3. Consider, also, the human effort involved in fighting and investigating the fires: Hesse tells us that over 41,000 manpower hours were involved. What impressed you most about the authorities' responses?

4. It took the police months to solve the crime? How did they finally catch the culprits?

5. A group of profilers descended on Accomack County. Talk about their insights and whether or not they were helpful in solving the crime?

6. Hesse takes a chapter to compare Charlie Smith and Tonya Bundick to Bonnie and Clyde Barrow. What are the similarities? Aside from the Barrows, how would you describe Charlie and Tony?

7. Follow-up to Question 6: What motivated the couple to turn to arson, especially on such a grand scale? What do you think of the two? Hesse spends a good deal of time detailing the specifics of their lives: does she build a sympathetic portrait? Do they spur your sympathy?

8. Hesse calls arson "a weird crime." What makes it so strange?

9. Fire itself interests the author—the way it's set, the way it moves, the way it's fought. Why do humans find fire so fascinating? What is the power it holds over us?

10. Even though we know the outcome in catching the arsonists, American Fire still thrums with suspense. How does Monica Hess do that?

11. What is the significance of the book's title, American Fire? Why "American"?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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