Belle Gunness was one of the most prolific serial murderesses in American history, (probably) kiilling two husbands, her own adopted daughter, and a bunch of men whom she took in as co-workers on her farm. She has been the subject of non-fiction (e.g. Harold Schechter's Hell's Princess), fiction masquerading as fiction (The Story of Belle Gunness), pure fiction, drama, and the odd song or two ("The Ballad of Belle Gunness").

This is none of these. You can learn a lot about the Gunness story from this book, but if you want the whole story, it's much easier to start somewhere else (probably with Schechter, the best-researched book on the subject that I have seen). This is, instead, a collection of the folklore about Belle, which slowly turned her from an angry mass murderer who (very possibly although not certainly) perished in a fire set by a disgruntled farmhand into a sort of a living terror weapon, stronger than a man and meaner than a man and too smart to be caught by a mere fire; she must have set it up to escape those who were slowly discovering her secret.... Most of it is bunk, of course, but the real Belle was unusual enough that, who knows, maybe some of it is true. And certainly some of it is still told.

Langlois collects many of these tales and perhaps tries to impose a certain sort of order on them. There is no other book of this sort about this particular story, so if that's what you're looking for, there is no substitute. And, since it was published 77 years after the fire that led to Belle's discovery, it is surely comprehensive for "first generation" folklore; more may have evolved since 1985 (e.g. Jane Simon Ammeson's America's Femme Fatale: The Story of Serial Killer Belle Gunness is pretty much pure folklore, although it pretends to be non-fiction), but the new tale won't be based on any contact with the actual facts of the case.

I know a lot more about folklore than about mass murderesses, and I wouldn't call this a great book. Although it attempts to organize the data, the results are occasionally chaotic, and I didn't find it a great read. But you really need it if you want to learn about all aspects of the Gunness case. ( )