Now, Gothamist has not read Chris Elliott's new book, The Shroud of the Thwacker, yet, but it sounds so much like one of our favorites - The Alienist by Caleb Carr, which was about an investigation of a grisly serial killer in turn of the century Manhattan. Here's a description of the Thwacker:

The book debut from the Get a Life and Cabin Boy star is billed as a parody, but this murder mystery wrapped in laughter is simply straight-up enjoyable. Jack the Jolly Thwacker is leaving dead bodies all over 1882 New York City. Chris Elliott, a modern-day researcher, is tracking the serial killer through time. Elliott's wry humor fastens on the burgeoning, Boss Tweedified city, giving it a hilarious and vividly imagined set of anachronistic technologies and accoutrements (New York's Mayor Teddy Roosevelt, who has mysteriously disappeared, has a navel piercing). The narrative leaps back and forth in time, as 1882 police chief Caleb Spencer chases the Thwacker through the streets, and Elliott, convinced the killer is from the 21st century, chases him through time. Elliott's ability to time travel is facilitated by Yoko Ono (don't ask) and a willing suspension of disbelief, but the results are very amusing (if often infantile in the style of There's Something About Mary), with asides on every page that bring in everyone and everything from Typhoid Mary to Skyy Vodka. If Shroud feels like an extended, Americanized Monty Python skit, it's also a rousing good yarn.

Like many others, one of Gothamist's favorite books about turn-of-the-century New York City is The Alienist by Caleb Carr. A novel about finding a cruel serial killer, The Alienist also had wall-to-wall details about what life was like in the city, with a particular grittiness that escaped film depictions. And we always liked how Carr would discuss in interviews that while people fret and worry about New York being crime-ridden, the kinds of horrors happening during the turn-of-the-cenutry were even more depraved; of course, this started our Carr mini-obsession. So we were excited to see the NYT Home and Garden feature about Carr and his upstate NY house which had more details of Carr's youth in Manhattan:

He talks about his block, 14th Street between Second and Third. more ›

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From Chick Lit to Chick Movie
Gothamist and its readers try to cast The Parker Grey Show.
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Gothamist is totally fascinated by this Times article about how society has actually been less violent over the centuries. The proposition from Norbert Elias, Swiss sociologist of the 1930s, was that things like using knives and forks (and not spitting or peeing in public) encouraged medieval society to transform into a more civilized one. "Elias has posthumously become the theoretical guru of a field that did not exist in 1939: the history of crime. It was then that pioneering historians began to do what most historians had thought impossible: create crime statistics for eras that did not systematically keep crime data." Further, murder was "much more common in the Middle Ages than it is now and that it dropped precipitately in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Something very important changed in Western behavior and attitudes, and it stood much prevailing social theory on its head." more ›