Warning: Spoilers for Matt Ruff’s Bad Monkeys and James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia.

I should probably not read Matt Ruff while on vacation. I found Bad Monkeys extremely disturbing. The main character has a violent background and some things to feel seriously guilty about. She leads a purposeless, drug-ridden life until recruited for a secret organization that fights evil. From then on the book is a hall of mirrors, and the apparent meaning of all the events is constantly shifting.

One reason the spygame plot (evil Troop versus fighting-evil Organization) bothered me is that good and evil don’t work that way. It’s not a question of which side you join. Some of the greatest evils of the past century were done by people who thought they were on the side of virtue, fighting evil.

What matters is what you do. How you do it. And although Ruff explicitly makes the point that otherwise good people can do evil, he doesn’t allow moral complexity its full scope.

James Ellroy‘s Black Dahlia is a compelling mess of a book. I never got the sense that the author was in control of his material — in fact, it was a runaway train. It also has some weird commonalities with Bad Monkeys. In each, a main character is carrying a huge burden of guilt for the disappearance of a sibling. Both books are meditations on good and evil. Also, they both have so many false endings that you can’t keep track of them.