The New York Times – by Sarah Weinman
Reading James Ellroy is like being dragged into hell. This, I should stress, is both a compliment and a curse. 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. The worst of his work, however, devolves into monotony, the staccato prose more repetitive than ruminative, the characters sliding into ugly caricature.
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