EricCWelch

All of Ellroy' books I have read relate to corruption, and this one is no exception. It purports to be the memoir, written from his prison cell, of a serial killer called "Sexecutioner" by the media. Martin Plunkett is an extremely bright, insane individual. He completely baffles the school psychologists who try to bring him out of his self imposed shell; he rarely talks to anyone. During class he withdraws into movie screen images-- brain movies, he calls them, superimposing his classmates' and teacher's faces into a collage of bizarre images. He then begins to identify with a comic character bad guy, the "Shroud Shifter." Following his mother's ""— switched her Phenobarbital tablets with some Benzedrine— is placed for some months with a burglary cop who unintentionally supplies him with assorted burglary tricks. During his first burglary, he runs into a guard dog that he kills, and the thrill provides a bizarre sexual release for him that turns a thrill into a compulsion. Despite his preternatural caution, during one escapade where he entered a house to watch two people make love, he is caught and sentenced to a year in prison. Despite his obvious intelligence, and the lie that he has a master' degree in library science — already, by age twentyone? asks the skeptical deputy — he is assigned to the Trash and Freight section as a trusty because he was so obviously fit from his workouts and showed he could do thirty-one chin-ups. This is where is real education begins, listening to the other convicts talk about their exploits and learning from their braggadocio. Released after nine months, he moves to San Francisco, continually tormented by the brain movies, and he gets a job digging out tree stumps for a real estate developer. Then one night everything explodes. Invited in for a beer with an inebriated couple, he freaks when the girl comes out of the bathroom having just died her hair blond, and he kills both of them. Traveling in Wisconsin, Plunkett is nearly caught in the middle of a snowstorm at a roadblock set up to catch a local rapist who had murdered a series of young women in southeastern Wisconsin. That killer is eventually revealed to Plunkett to be a Wisconsin State Police sergeant, who forms a weird bond with Plunkett, and the two embark independently on assorted murder sprees. Plunkett's personal revelations are interspersed with newspaper reports of their homicides and later the diary of the FBI agent assigned to tracking down reports of unsolved murders where the killer may have crossed state lines. This book, despite its ghoulishness, is very hard to put down. I read it at one sitting, hardly able to get up for the bathroom. Ellroy has taken his exploration of evil to a new high (low?).