From the title story, which maps the friendship between two beautiful and mysteriously doomed young women in 1940s Los Angeles - Elizabeth Short, known as the 'Black Dahlia, ' victim of a long-unsolved and particularly brutal murder, and her roommate Norma Jeane Baker, soon to become Marilyn Monroe, to the tale of the wife of a well-to-do businessman who is ravished by, and elopes with, a lover who is a hyena, these stories explore the commingling of sexual love and violence and the tumult of family life.