Something horrible happened to 17-year-old Sarabeth: She was kidnapped and held captive by a stranger, released and then disbelieved by her ultrareligious family and law enforcement. It may be purgatory, or perhaps, like his progenitor Mickey Spillane, this was camp all along. By the novel’s end, after Freddy’s endless conquests of cardboard cutout women (celebrity, real, or imagined), after too many brutal murders of said conquests, Ellroy’s brand of hell seems tuckered out. Quartet or “ American Tabloid,” or the damning pathos of his memoir “ My Dark Places,” but it’s nowhere near as convoluted (nor as long) as “ The Cold Six Thousand” or “ Perfidia.” Here, the energy inhabiting a fictional funhouse-mirror version of the private investigator Freddy Otash, known in real life (and here) for his devil-work on Confidential magazine, is more entertaining than annoying.Īnd yet. His latest, WIDESPREAD PANIC (Knopf, 336 pp., $28), lacks the magisterial force of the L.A. The worst of his work, however, devolves into monotony, the staccato prose more repetitive than ruminative, the characters sliding into ugly caricature. The best of Ellroy seems to echo Dante’s “Inferno,” spiraling down circle after circle into the depths of mid-20th-century depravity where some greater meaning can be found - only to be upended and refracted. This, I should stress, is both a compliment and a curse. Reading James Ellroy is like being dragged into hell.
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