A review by jdcorley
American Tabloid by James Ellroy

challenging dark medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

You can see The Black Dahlia as the hinge point for Ellroy - you can follow him into the more conventional, Manichean cop stories, dark and exciting but suffused with good versus evil...or you can enter the Underworld USA series. American Tabloid is an unflinching, completely brutal and repellent in-your-face mission statement for the series, portraying midcentury America as a horror show of racism, corruption, hate, bigotry, antisemitism, and oligarchy. Thoroughly rooted in a history that's frantically being suppressed (this is not to say it's a true story, or that the conspiracies depicted are real, but simply that America is desperate to scream that it was never as bad as it was), it is the world, not the awful, broken characters violently staggering across it, that draws the reader in and drowns them. Ideology is for chumps, patriotism is stupid. America's an irredeemable wasteland of human garbage strangling each other to get ahead. As the underrated film Killing Them Softly would eventually summarize: "In America you're on your own." It's a lonely, cold vicious book, and in the last moment you realize everything that's coming after in a way you can't get from a history book. Beautiful, sickening, there's nothing like it.