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Tusitala's Book Reviews

James Ellroy - The Black Dahlia

ISBN: 0099366517

Bought at the airport, and read in the blistering heat of a Carolina summer, this is the book to raise all your temperatures. For like Dickens, everyone in Ellroy lives according to their own private obsessions, and these obsessions corrode away at any glimpses of human contentment.

The Dahlia herself, as the nick name suggests spreads her dark fragrance throughout many destinies, becoming the very expression of all that they secretly desire. And desire governs every action in the book, a desire superbly rendered in the bloody poetry of Ellroy's prose. Even when I had stopped reading the novel, I could still hear it pulsing on: its dark vitality a revelation of love's cruelty and ironic submission; the terrible price paid for ambivalent intimacy!

And I cried at the end with the hero's final epiphany that the dead -in- life need our compassion as much as the dead.

'I reached for Betty then; a wish, almost a prayer. The clouds broke up and the plane descended, a big bright city at twilight below. I asked Betty to grant me safe passage in return for my love.'

Reviewed By: Tusitala

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