It would be a relief if Stacy Horn’s latest book were a horror novel. If The Killing Fields of East New York: The First Subprime Mortgage Scandal, a White-Collar Crime Spree, and the Collapse of an American Neighborhood were fiction, then it would be easier to shake the scenes she describes in the titular Brooklyn community.
But Horn’s a reporter, not a fabulist. She’s chronicling the decades of crime that turned a once-prosperous neighborhood into a hellhole. Whenever we read a gruesome anecdote, we have to acknowledge it’s real.
Perhaps you’ll be most appalled by the descriptions of children being thrown to their deaths from rooftops. (It happens more than once.) Maybe the story about a clergyman being murdered in his own church, in front of his parishioners, will haunt you the longest. Or maybe it’ll be something mundane, like the bit where animal-control officials won’t collect a dead dog because they’re too scared to walk down the block where it collapsed…