My Dark Places
by James Ellroy
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Book Summary Information
Author: James EllroyEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1997-08-19
ISBN: 0679762051
Number of pages: 427
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of My Dark Places
Book Review: My Dark Places reviewed
Summary: 4 Stars
A couple guys told me I must read My Dark Places after I read L.A. Confidential. I waited. Then I picked up a book by Steve Hodel called Black Dahlia Avenger which was truly fantastic. A small part of the story is Hodel's belief in who killed Ellroy's mother in the 50s, which is one of Ellroy's dark places (what can I say? I cannot write like those two), and Ellroy believes or believed that Hodel truly found the Dahlia's murderer, so My Dark Places followed. I never would have thought the true story of these murders, if they are true, would be so graphic, and so my heart went out to Ellroy in this book, esp. in his descriptions of his mother (and may both authors please forgive me for my college English).
Summary of My Dark Places
"Astonishing . . . original, daring, brilliant."--Philadelphia Inquirer
In 1958 Jean Ellroy was murdered, her body dumped on a roadway in a seedy L.A. suburb. Her killer was never found, and the police dismissed her as a casualty of a cheap Saturday night. James Ellroy was ten when his mother died, and he spent the next thirty-six years running from her ghost and attempting to exorcize it through crime fiction. In 1994, Ellroy quit running. He went back to L.A., to find out the truth about his mother--and himself.
In My Dark Places, our most uncompromising crime writer tells what happened when he teamed up with a brilliant homicide cop to investigate a murder that everyone else had forgotten--and reclaim the mother he had despised, desired, but never dared to love. What ensues is a epic of loss, fixation, and redemption, a memoir that is also a history of the American way of violence.
"Ellroy is more powerful than ever."
--The Nation
James Ellroy's trademark is his language: it is sometimes caustically funny and always brazen. When he's hitting on all cylinders, as he is in My Dark Places, his style makes punchy rhythms out of short sentences using lingo such as "scoot" (dollar), "trim" (sex), and "brace" (to interrogate). But the premise for My Dark Places is what makes it especially compelling: Ellroy goes back to his own childhood to investigate the central mystery behind his obsession with violence against women--the death of his mother when he was 10 years old. It's hard to imagine a more psychologically treacherous, more self-exposing way in which to write about true crime. The New York Times calls it a "strenuously involving book.... Early on, Mr. Ellroy makes a promise to his dead mother that seems maudlin at first: 'I want to give you breath.' But he's done just that and--on occasion--taken ours away."
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