Jason Carter

The journey of James Ellroy

Revisado: 10-05-23

This first ever full-length biography of James Ellroy is easily far more than just a simple rehashing of the Demon Dog’s well-documented life. Just as Ellroy himself has described Jack Webb’s The Badge as a type of Rosetta Stone for understanding the pathogenesis of Ellroy’s work, you can view Love Me Fierce in Danger the same way… In fact, the biography’s narrative thrust manages to accurately capture and reflect the many sides of its ornate and enthralling subject.
Like the Demon Dog himself, Love Me Fierce in Danger is by turns hilarious, shocking, compassionate, hopeful, uncompromising, optimistic, determined, and—ultimately successful at the ambitious task of detailing an equally ambitious and epic life.
Steven Powell also gives us candid and insightful analysis into the origins and progression of both Ellroy’s well-hashed outrageous public persona, and the Demon Dog’s monastically Beethovian private life, with all the idiosyncrasies, private insecurities, coping mechanisms, and solitary circumspection that bind these two extreme polarities for James Ellroy just like everyone else.
Love me Fierce in Danger is first a portrait of the artist as an energetic and trauma-tempered young dog, and then later—an elder hound both content with the considerable dent he’s made in the universe, and yet still today as a septuagenarian, not content to simply roll over…
For Ellroy fans and scholars both old and new, Love Me Fierce in Danger has plenty to spark and—more importantly—maintain your intrigue, even if you were certain you already knew all about James Ellroy’s exhaustively documented life…
I’m a perfect example of that: Despite being a rabid Ellroy fan and devotee since I was 14 years old (27 years ago…), and even after reading literally hundreds of Ellroy interviews and related media throughout that time, there were elements of Love Me Fierce in Danger that surprised even me… No spoilers here, but there’s even a highly symbolic scene involving the Demon Dog as a then-infantile Demon Puppy that serves as a foreshadowing of Ellroy’s evisceration—and thus, humanizing—of Hollywood’s numerous dirty secrets in the decades to come…
You can also see the painful reverberations—far into adulthood—of Ellroy’s childhood traumas, which certainly include, but also go far beyond the well-tread territory of his mother’s brutal 1958 murder. While you might expect some degree of this from any biography, with James Ellroy, it’s even more prescient, because the generational ramifications of past misdeeds is a deliberately haunting, discomforting, and necessary motif in all the Demon Dog’s novels.
With Love Me Fierce in Danger, Steven Powell—the foremost global expert on all things Ellroy—has given us an exhilarating examination of a complex and brilliant man scarred and then sculpted by tragedy, who has created his career—and indeed his whole adult life—with the same unrelenting pursuit Ellroy employs in skillfully weaving together his byzantine and symphonic fictional narratives… Indeed, as Steven Powell masterfully demonstrates, creation and performance are lifelong necessary tactics of survival for Ellroy.
Love Me Fierce in Danger is a volume that will be scrutinized and studied for decades to come, and as such is a perfect omniscient companion to Ellroy’s 1996 autobiography… and while in that book, Ellroy gave us a relentless Virgil-like tour of his dark places, Steven Powell’s Love Me Fierce in Danger is thus a welcoming and warming torch to illuminate the walls of the underworld with introspective shadows…
Love Me Fierce in Danger even respectfully acknowledges its subject’s lifelong fascination with mysticism, as the biography concludes on a mystical note evocative of a key piece of wisdom from Ellroy’s novel Blood’s A Rover: “Take note of what you are seeking, for it is seeking you…”

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