American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land

by Monica Hesse

Overview

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year

One of Amazon’s 20 Best Books of the Year

Named one of the Best Books of the Year by Buzzfeed, Bustle, NPR, NYLON, and Thrillist

Finalist for the Goodreads Book Award (Nonfiction)

Finalist for the Edgar Award (Best Fact Crime)

A Book of the Month Club Selection

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection

“A brisk, captivating and expertly crafted reconstruction of a community living through a time of fear.... Masterful.” —Washington Post

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.

“One of the year’s best and most unusual true-crime books” (Christian Science Monitor), American Fire brings to vivid life the reeling county of Accomack. “Ace reporter” (Entertainment Weekly) Monica Hesse spent years investigating the story, emerging with breathtaking portraits of the arsonists—troubled addict Charlie Smith and his girlfriend, Tonya Bundick. Tracing the shift in their relationship from true love to crime spree, Hesse also conjures the once-thriving coastal community, decimated by a punishing economy and increasingly suspicious of their neighbors as the culprits remained at large. Weaving the story into the history of arson in the United States, the critically acclaimed American Fire re-creates the anguished nights this quiet county lit up in flames, evoking a microcosm of rural America—a land half-gutted before the fires began.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631494512
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	05/22/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	53,051
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Monica Hesse is a feature writer for the Washington Post.  Winner of the Edgar Award and a finalist for a Livingston and James Beard Award, she is also the author of Girl in the Blue Coat. She lives in Washington, DC.

Table of Contents

Preface xi

1 "Charge That Line!" 3

2 "The South Starts Here" 12

3 "Orange in the Sky" 21

4 Charlie 35

5 Monomanie Incendiaire 43

6 Tonya 50

7 "Like A Ghost" 57

8 "Tell Us What You Know about That" 71

9 Charlie and Tonya 82

10 SchröDinger's Evidence 90

11 The Eastern Shore Arsonist Hunters 97

12 "I've seen Enough Ass to Know" 105

13 "Like Hell Was Coming Up Through the Ground" 113

14 Tonya And Charlie 120

15 "They're Not Hunters At All" 127

16 "I didn't Light Them All" 131

17 "Someday they'll go Down Together" 138

18 "Everybody Has A Reason For Why They Do Things in Life" 144

19 "I can't Tell You Something I don't Know" 156

20 "Midnight Without Makeup" 169

21 The Broken Things 173

22 "Time To Wake Up" 185

23 Burned 194

24 "We'd Done It Before" 196

25 "They Came Out Of Everywhere" 215

26 "Moral Turpitude" 225

27 What Happened Next 229

28 "It's over" 236

Acknowledgments 241

Notes 245

Editorial 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.

The New York Times - Jennifer Senior

03/27/2017
Washington Post reporter Hesse (Girl in the Blue Coat) leads readers on an extended tour of a bizarre five-month crime spree in rural Accomack County, Va.: a series of over 80 arsons, of predominantly abandoned buildings, committed by a local couple. It began one day in November 2012 with four fires in 24 hours and carried on for five months. As hysteria mounted, police camped out in tents near potential targets and a group of vigilantes set up their own operation. At the center of this narrative is the extremely compelling couple: Charlie Smith, a 38-year-old recovering drug addict, and Tonya Bundick, a 40-year-old partier described as the “queen” of the local nightclub, Shuckers. Hesse traces their romance from charming Facebook exchanges and plans of a Guns N’ Roses themed wedding to passing notes in the prison yard after their arrest. Their love totally imploded under the pressure of their prosecution. Hesse offers sociological insight into a small town where “doors went unlocked, bake sales and brisket fund-raisers were well attended” despite its downward economic trajectory. There is something metaphorical, she notes, about a rural county suffering through a recession being literally burned to the ground. The metaphor becomes belabored by the time Hesse shoehorns in a comparison between small-town America and the aforementioned Shuckers, but otherwise this is a page-turning story of love gone off the rails. (July)

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.

Annie Bostrom - Booklist

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

Mesmerizing. . . . Hesse recounts the fires and their investigation and the subsequent trials with cinematic immediacy.

Jonathan Miles - Garden & Gun

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.

Jennifer Senior - New York Times

American Fire is a wonderful book of page-turning, true-crime reportage, exquisitely reported with both humanity and humor. Books like this remind us, in an uncertain time, of what journalism is supposed to look like.

Nick Reding

A rare combination of reportorial know-how and literary flair, American Fire is a page-turner. Crimes and chaos, detectives and firefighters, headlines and red herrings, and it all boils down to a Gothic love story gone wrong. You need time to investigate a story like this, following the police leads all the way to the hidden-in-plain-sight, off-kilter individuals generating the mayhem; you need space to tell a story like this, fact-based and evocative. People who think they don’t like nonfiction will devour this book. People who love nonfiction will love it, too.

Melissa Fay Greene

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

America in decline, a love gone berserk, and fire…lots and lots of it. If you pick up this book and open it to the first page, I double-dog dare you to put it down.

Dennis Covington

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

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

A brisk, captivating and expertly crafted reconstruction of a community living through a time of fear, confusion and danger. . . . Masterful.

Scott W. Berg - Washington Post

Hesse, who covered the arsons for The Washington Post, is an ace reporter, but she’s an even better storyteller. American Fire is as propulsive as a crime thriller. A-

Tina Jordan - Entertainment Weekly

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

One of the year's best and most unusual true-crime books.

Randy Dotinga - Christian Science Monitor

05/15/2017
The hunt for the "mad bomber"; Uber hits the global highway; ghost writers of history, who were they?

Library Journal

★ 2017-03-20
A captivating narrative about arson, persistent law enforcers, an unlikely romantic relationship, and a courtroom drama.The setting is Accomack County, a lightly populated area of the Eastern Shore "separated from the rest of the state by the Chesapeake Bay and a few hundred years of cultural isolation." Washington Post reporter Hesse (Girl in the Blue Coat, 2016) knew almost nothing about the economically depressed, desolate county when she first visited there in 2013 after hearing about a series of regularly occurring arsons of abandoned buildings. Eventually, the number of similar-seeming arsons would top out at 67. Though there were no reported deaths or serious injuries, the burning buildings were exhausting the lightly staffed volunteer fire departments in the county and consuming the resources of local and state law enforcement agencies. For nearly half a year, police mounted sophisticated stakeouts hoping to catch the arsonist in the act, but they consistently failed to identify a suspect. Even a profiler, who, it turned out, accurately predicted the neighborhood where the arsonist resided, did not see his lead pan out. Then, finally, a stakeout at an unoccupied home paid off. Hesse reveals the culprit early in the book—two of them, actually, Charlie Smith and Tonya Bundick ("Bonnie and Clyde of the Eastern Shore"), who lived together romantically along with Bundick's sons. Local police knew the culprits personally; Smith had even served as a volunteer firefighter, as did his brother. As Hesse constructs her narrative, the 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 unknown to most who have never resided on or visited the Eastern Shore. A true-crime saga that works in every respect.

Kirkus Reviews

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