I first loathed this book and then got really into it. It's mostly vibes. I feel like the traditional standards of appreciation or criticism can't apply here. For the first time in a long while, I had to go back and read the prologue to make better sense of it, which I kind of appreciated.

What more can be said for James Ellroy that hasn't been said before? Ellroy is a master of the bebop crime story. An LA native who knows where all the dirt is and sings about it with a street poet's flair for language and story. Freddy Otash returns to the forefront in this quick, quirky, funny, and purely Ellroy story. A must-read for all LA noir fanatics and Ellroy fiends.

I was enjoying the first 150 pages of The Enchanters because, following the overbearing playfulness of the author's previous novel, Widespread Panic, and the somewhat exhaustively convoluted plot of the one before that, This Storm, this was feeling like a return to form; particularly, to Ellroy's Underworld USA trilogy. Hitting the book's halfway point, however, I found it the most tedious novel of his career, and one of the most convoluted; almost certainly the most repetitive.

Charming and funny and exciting in places, definitely intriguing, the book is just overburdened by the weight of its complexity. If you're a fan of Ellroy's work, as I am, and all you're looking for is the companionable voice--you'll find it here on every page. If you're looking for a rounded reading experience, a genuinely stirring novel, I'd suggest visiting his 1990s work.

The premise of The Enchanters is delightful. One of James Ellroy’s main characters, Freddy Otash, is back in action. Otash is alive and not always well in the early 1960s, doing his thing in a world that includes Jimmy Hoffa, Marilyn Monroe, the Kennedys, the Lawfords, Bill Parker, Darryl Gates, Liz Taylor, and, as per usual in an Ellroy novel, a long list, it run four pages at the back of the book, of other characters that move in and out of Otash’s brutal world with frequency and ease.

Earlier this year, Ellroy, in conversation with fellow Los Angeles novelist Michael Connelly during the LA Times “Festival of Books,” described The Enchanters as such, “…the tragic Freddy Otash. No scandal rag magazine chit chat. No alliterative slang. Freddy’s on the skids. He’s been on the skids, and he’s there when the cops find Marilyn Monroe’s body, but it’s not a Marilyn Monroe book. It’s something bigger and more sinister than that.”

That’s a perfect description of the book.

From the novel’s start, The Enchanters is pure Ellroy. It opens violence for the sake of violence, done by a group of men, who we know from past Ellroy works, whose sole job seems to be meting out that violence.

From there, Otash gets tapped to do what he does best, dig up dirt. His client is Jimmy Hoffa, and he wants Otash to work the Marilyn Monroe, Kennedy brothers beat. That assignment doesn’t last too long, thanks to Monroe’s demise. However, as Ellroy told Connelly, it’s at that point where things take a sinister turn, and Otash’s list of clients gets more extensive and more powerful.

The Enchanters is classic Ellroy, the short, punchy sentences, the violence, the sex, the guilt, the misogyny, it’s all there. But the novel lacks something. It doesn’t have the urgency of his previous works. In the hands of anyone but Ellroy, this novel would fall flat. That’s not to say it’s bad or should be avoided. It’s neither of those things. The Enchanters fits nicely into Ellroy’s canon, but it seems as if he’s holding something back throughout the book, which is a shock considering the time, the setting, and the cast of characters he’s working with for over 400 pages.

As with most Ellroy tomes, there are no good guys among the main characters in The Enchanters. Everyone’s tainted, everyone’s dirty, everyone’s fucked. Everyone’s looking to get unfucked while simultaneously looking to find someone to fuck over.

One of the pleasant surprises of The Enchanters is that it mostly sticks to the subject at hand and doesn’t wander like some of Ellroy’s more recent novels, think Perfidia and This Storm. It’s easy to follow even with its length and large and shifting cast of characters.

No one gets out of an Ellroy novel without some dirt on them. He’s always been the master at finding the curtain and not peaking behind it but lighting it on fire after locking the doors to prevent those behind it from escaping. The Enchanters delivers in that way. Like he told Connelly, “I had fun lampooning cultural figures I despise.”

The Enchanters is worth a read, but I suggest hitting the 2021 novel Widespread Panic, which has Otash confessing his sins from Purgatory before diving in.

Imperfect but peak late stage Ellroy with some of the most famous and notorious figures of mid twentieth century America at the center— Marilyn Monroe, JFK, and Jimmy Hoffa. The more I think about this book, the more it haunts me. It’s such a wild and riveting amalgam of real historical context and psychosexual speculative fiction.

Full review to come in print.