Paul Bryant's Reviews > My Dark Places

SHORT REVIEW

A transcendent high-octane memoir that burns all other memoirs to the ground. A five star must read.

LITTLE BIT LONGER REVIEW

Rereading nonfiction is a rarity for me but for the second time this stunning book left me convinced that James Ellroy is one of the Greatest Living Authors. And yet

And yet

I do not read James Ellroy novels. I’ve only read two and abandoned a third. Why is this ?

It’s because Ellroy went TOO FAR. There are authors who go TOO FAR. James Joyce went mad and wrote Finnegans Wake, a book only 47 people have ever read all the way through. Henry James became gradually unreadable as his sentences exfoliated into the length of a paragraph and then a page with so many clauses and subclauses you have to investigate each one like it’s a murder case needing a solution. He went too far. And for me Ellroy, with his staccato ratatat nailgun style and his dense cop and underworld slang and his byzantine plots and his murky conspiratorial under-history of America and his everybody is a walking bag of pus attitude, he also became unreadable. I think I need to try again though, and try harder this time.

Part one of this book is 150 pages of Ellroy’s life story from age 10 to around 30, it’s all pure jawdropping brilliance. Kicks off with the sex murder of his mother in 1958, and how he and his father were pretty pleased, that’s right, that she was dead so they could carry on their degenerate lives together in peace. So there’s two jolts for the reader, and then comes the 100 pages of vileness that was the youthful Ellroy – he was a Nazi, a chronic shoplifter, broke into houses for the purpose of stealing women’s underwear, lived on amphetamine, became homeless, the list of his crimes and follies goes on, like Celine Dion’s heart. Maiden aunts were well advised to steer clear of the young Ellroy. Actually, the whole human race would have been best advised to avoid him.

Next part of the book is where he hires an investigator to see if between them they could crack the unsolved murder of his mother. This involves crawling all over the original case, all over his father’s life, all over his mother’s life, and coming to a wrenching emotional conclusion.

I could just possibly imagine this book would not be for everyone.