Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murder

Rating:
Summary: The Shadow Side of 1947
Review: Written with an engaging economy, "Severed" vividly channels a dark world from a time of simple sanitized surfaces covering over turbulent fractured post-WWII currents. It reflects something of both the general zeitgeist of the forties and the plight of many women in that era with respect to what was available for meaning and security.

Beth Short had a shameful secret: a young woman in her early 20's and on her own, her sex organs failed to develop making it impossible to have genital sexual relations. Beneath her caked make-up and "Black Dahlia" apparel were teeth in an advanced state of decay. The physical reality of her body mirrored her psychological reality. Psychologically, she lacked the requisite emotional maturity for reciprocal and committed relatedness with other adults. Instead, she remained an "as if" figure on the periphery, tantalizing but entirely unable to deliver. True to the times, she hid from her own deep insecurities, depression, and shame via a femme fatal persona and a fragile grandiose illusion that she could seductively master an alien masculine world into giving her the validation and security she craved. She was underneath, a masochist, seeking to absorb and overcome the sadistic cruel world of rejection and neglect. And she deluded herself in the belief she was succeeding. But as her world of contingencies inevitably grew more complex and menacing, her character style grew more impulsive and sociopathic. Ultimately, her path took her to the heart of sadistic darkness, that based on the coroner's inventory, extended to a level of cruelty and human deconstruction that the author found too unspeakable to explicitly assay.

David Lynch, who reportedly had once reserved rights to bring Elizabeth Short's story to film, would be the perfect film-maker to capture this stark twilight shadow world-but too perfect perhaps-this story unblinkingly confronts the cruelest realities of the human condition.

Rating:
Summary: A Modern masterpiece
Review: You are smacked into the middle of the 1940's in tinseltown, and all the crackpots and shady characters prowling Hollywood Boulevard and Main Street. Elizabeth Short is trying to make it as an actress, even as an extra, but nobody gives her a break. The world is in a big transition. The city is crawling with soldiers and sailors and marines and airforce pilots, and natch the girls to entertain them in the cheap bars of downtown LA and Hollywood. This book doesn't flinch in portraying the hard life on the road for a pretty girl at the end of the Second World War. A dark, forboding feeling is over everything, behind the laughs and the flirtations. There is mystery and a sense of danger. The beginning of the book details the finding of the body of the Black Dahlia, and this is without peer in crime writing. This is a masterful work, and John Gilmore is a masterful writer. I cannot recommended this book highly enough. This is not a READ, it is an EXPERIENCE like watching a dark, strange ballet, full of shadow figures.