Ticket 2 Ride

Rarely, do I abandon a book. Yet it happened again. Halfway through This Storm (2019) by James Ellroy, I admitted defeat. Almost three hundred pages in, I felt trapped in a maze that I couldn’t find the exit.

In the past month I’ve read two other gargantuan novels by Ellroy and lived to tell about it. Those books were accompanied by an Ellroy documentary and a biography. Too much Ellroy? Likely.

This Storm isn’t a bad novel, it’s typical Ellroy, which was the problem. As I’ve stated in other Ellroy blogs, Ellroy has his own writing style and hepcat vocabulary. It’s tough going, but I felt like the story was slow and serpentine, it went into unnecessarily back and forth, but not forward.

The book is set in 1942, war has just been declared. Japanese-Americans are being rounded up and interned in camps. There are Japanese submarines thought to be operating from the Mexican coast, so Dudley Smith, a captain in Army Intelligence, is dispatched there. More time is spent on the characters’ drugging, sex and trying to get a step up on their colleagues, rather than solving some heinous mass murders of Japanese sailors. Ellroy can be a very effective storyteller when he isn’t sidetracked by wallowing into his character’s proclivities and hedonism. Too much sidetracking and not enough focus on plot. Ellroy was said in interviews that based on sales, his readership has declined in recent years.

Reading This Storm felt like work, not reading pleasure. These must be a story within the book, but I could only find threads that didn’t advance the story. The characters were drifting off into areas that didn’t appeal to me and I couldn’t find the relevance.

I hate quitting a book, but I hate wasting my time even more. I’ve already moved on to another mystery series I’m working through.