Ellroy also likes to be semi-funny, his specialty being sadistic slapstick (which sometimes disgusts me), and...he likes to meditate on the American dream of financial and reputational success ... Whenever I start another Ellroy novel, I become a fly, buzzing ghoulishly over multiply stabbed corpses and taking refreshment from some backdoor schemer’s cask-strength whiskey bottle
A master of brutal noir, Ellroy digs deep into his imagination in this densely populated depiction of the political demimondes ... Fascinating ... A baroque crime fabulist, Ellroy swamps the reader with words and characters.
A novel that is both lacerating and mesmerising in equal parts ... An experience that will leave the reader with metaphorical bruises ... Ellroy’s cynical alternative history of his country is shot through with corruption, sleaze and sex, a bloodstained American canvas that would have the Founding Fathers spinning in their graves ... Despite his vituperation against liberal viewpoints, the evidence of Ellroy’s books indicates that he hates the more ingrained shibboleths of the conservative American establishment just as much.
