Then when I saw the artist's ( Stephen Peringer) rendering of Short on the cover of the Mysterious Press paperback of The Black Dahlia awhile later, I was struck by its similarity to Fenn.
In those days I was, like many young men, pretty much obsessed with Sherilyn Fenn and her character Audrey Horne on David Lynch's 1990/91 TV show, "Twin Peaks." Her noir-tastic photo from the previous summer's Rolling Stone magazine was one I couldn't shake. Why did I choose to read it? I'd never read a crime novel before. I read The Black Dahlia for the first time in early 1991. But The Black Dahlia thrives in both arenas. Horror, to paraphrase Poe and Lovecraft, is about that singular frisson of terror itself. But because it's concerned with the procedural aspects of tracking down criminals, and not solely trying to freak you out, it gets a pass on the horror label.
The genres seem to split fans too: how many people deny The Silence of the Lambs is horror? And yet it's about a serial killer and a cannibal. The two genres delve into human depravity but approach it in different manners: crime is generally matter-of-fact in its dealings with violence horror wants to reduce you to whimpers and overwhelm you. I've been thinking about Ellroy since he's got this new TV series starting up on the history of Los Angeles murders and scandals, as well as my recent musings about the intersection of crime and horror fiction. My introduction to the disturbing real-life horror story that is the death of Elizabeth Short came in the form of James Ellroy's novel The Black Dahlia.
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