Black dahlia & white rose

Joyce Carol Oates

In this work the author offers a collection of 11 previously uncollected stories, including a title piece that tracks the friendship between Elizabeth Short, famously known as the Black Dahlia, the victim of a markedly brutal murder in 1940s Los Angeles that remains unsolved, and her roommate, Norma Jeane Baker who became Marilyn Monroe. In each of these stories the author explores the menace that lurks at the edge of and intrudes upon even the seemingly safest of lives and maps the transformational cost of such instrusions.