I Am the Dark Tourist
Travels to the Darkest Sites on Earth
HE Sawyer
Headpress 2019
PB, 292pp, illus, notes, bib, ind, £15.99, ISBN 9781909394582
The image of the author on the cover of this book – wearing a plague doctor’s mask – says something about what to expect inside, as the self-styed hero revisits the ‘dark’ tourism sites he’s travelled to over the past 40 years.
The book opens with Sawyer on a Jack the Ripper tour, and there’s a smattering of the casual sexism that can be found throughout the book: “Why are we here if not to see the actual spot where a bloated, stumpy, middle-aged streetwalker was repeatedly stabbed to death over a century ago?”
After this rough start, he launches into the background of dark tourism, detailing the numerous sites worldwide – from Alcatraz to Bodyworlds, as well as more ‘niche’ locales, like UK serial killer Dennis Nilsen’s flat. We learn that there is a dark tourism ‘top five wish list’ and hear rumours of plans to develop ‘Jonestown’, where more than 900 people drank cyanide laced Kool-Aid in the Guyanese jungle in 1978.
Sawyer’s first stop is the 9/11 Memorial in New York, where he ponders the irony of entering a museum dedicated to events created by hijacked planes through what feels like airport security. In Chernobyl, he smokes cigarettes and drinks vodka like some kind of movie detective. It’s a shame that we often seem to get more of the author’s life story than information about gems like the Kelvedon Hatch Secret Nuclear Bunker (see FT378:30-36) – a perfect setting for futuristic, post-apocalyptic LARPing. Thankfully, he drops the poetic introductions by the third, shipwreck-themed, chapter, where we go on ‘wreck safari’ to the Salem Express,
down in the Egyptian Red Sea “at the black end of the dark spectrum… There’s an encrusted ghetto blaster, the obligatory and evocative solitary shoe, then a suitcase…” He goes to Australia to dive the SS Yongala, in which all 122 people aboard went down with the ship: “I don’t believe in ghosts,” he writes, “but if I did, they’d be here.”
At Auschwitz, he’s fulfilling a promise made to a Holocaust survivor friend, Sissy, who died in 1999. “Sissy’s testimony was part of the ‘Survivors of the Shoah’ Visual History Foundation, founded by film director Steven Spielberg.” Sissy’s tale is probably the highlight of the book. Sawyer paints a loving picture of a woman who was totally nonchalant about being thanked by Steven Spielberg but beside herself when she dropped her walking stick in Marks & Spencer one day and snooker legend Steve Davis picked it up: “OH. MY. GOTT! I COULD NOT BELIEVE IT! STEVE! DAVIS!”
In Cambodia, Sawyer meets survivors of Pol Pot’s regime, observing that he feels “neutered in the presence of survivors at dark sites, as if they only survived in order to benefit tourism and to cater for my curiosity.” I can see why museum staff the world over don’t email him back. At the Tuol Sleng Information office he is “disarmed by [the] age, beauty and stance” of the tour guide before heading to the Killing Fields and making a ridiculous comparison between them and a mini golf course.
Then he’s off to Aokigahra, a Japanese forest famous for suicides: “Once I stepped over the barrier ropes bearing the ‘No Entry’ sign into the forest I was looking for a corpse.” It’s disturbing to say the least. His final stop is the Welsh mining village of Aberfan, where in 1966 150,000 tonnes of mining slurry buried the local school and 20 houses. 144 villagers lost their lives; 116 were children between the ages of seven and 10. ”
If you’re willing to ignore the author’s feeble attempts at poetic prose and at times weird observations, the book serves as a detailed and well-researched guide for anyone wanting to travel to places associated with death and the macabre.
Sophie Collard
★★★★★