The Killer on the Road is Martin Plunkett. He’s a super smart guy with no soul, a guy who discovers his true vocation as a murderer in the occasionally sunny town of San Francisco. He relishes his ability to commit the perfect murders, and spends the next decade traveling across the states wrecking havoc until he finds a true soul mate, which proves to be his undoing.
Ellroy uses first person narrator here and uses it to show you just how twisted this Martin Plunkett is. It’s very effective. Plunkett grows up, refining his technique to the tune of the Manson murders and sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll. His mind is terrible, and it’s even more eerie if you have read Ellroy’s autobiography of sorts, My Dark Places. Plunkett’s beginnings remind me much of Ellroy’s own. (Not that I think Ellroy is a serial killer or anything, just that he obviously knows a thing or two about breaking and entering.)
I think Killer on the Road is second in my list of favorite Ellroy books, following closely behind The Black Dahlia. It’s just so evil.
Rating: 4 ½ Purrs for just being you, Mr. Ellroy. No one writes quite like you do.
1 comment:
"Killer on the Road" was the first Ellroy I read. While very different from most of his other work, it really is seminal. It was written before the whole "serial killer chic" and the popularity of such things as "Silence of the Lambs". It is unique (or at least was at the time) in that it was the first novel written from the perspective of the killer himself, in a believable way, and incoporating things the FBI etc have learned about their minds. Chilling, gruesome, fantastic book.
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