...
Show More
This was an outstanding story seen through the eyes of Sheriff Lou Ford of the small, remote west Texas town of Central City. Is he an easygoing, well-liked man and a respected citizen known for his quiet, gentle nature? On the inside, he has a dark side. He is a sociopathic killer who believes life is ruled by any means necessary, filled with both corny small-town friendliness and murderous psychosexual rage. He won't hesitate to eliminate his loved ones with brutal emotional detachment. In the novel's discussion, he describes his perspective on life. "You're a square Joe," Johnny said. "Am I?" I replied. "How do you know I am, Johnny? How can a man ever really know anything? We're living in a strange world, kid, a peculiar civilization. The police play crooks, and the crooks do police duty. The politicians are preachers, and the preachers are politicians. The tax collectors collect for themselves. The bad people want us to have more money, and the good people are fighting to keep it from us. It's not good for us, you know what I mean? If we all had all we wanted to eat, we'd crap too much. We'd have inflation in the toilet paper industry. That's how I understand it. That's about the size of some of the arguments I've heard." "There's a time of peace," I said, "and a time of war. A time to sow and a time to reap. A time to live and a time to die." Jim Thompson creates a protagonist we come to like, yet he has a side we'd all hate. Thompson shows that the cliched view of 1950s America as a land of communal benevolence and white picket fences needs attention. It's paper thin, with a cancerous presence beneath the surface from the actions of "evil that men do." It's a mark of Thompson's skill that our identification with Lou, encouraged by his first-person narration, is never quite broken. While he seems to explain his actions, he doesn't fully understand why he takes that path. He tries to understand himself by quoting a psychology textbook. "The subject suffers from strong feelings of guilt... combined with a sense of frustration and persecution... which increase as he grows older; yet there are rarely if ever any surface signs of... disturbance. On the contrary, his behavior appears to be entirely logical. He reasons soundly, even shrewdly. He is completely aware of what he does and why he does it..." This was my first Thompson novel, and it made me seek out his other works. I found them all just as hard-boiled and compelling. The recent movie adaptation was good but had some brutal images. Also on my webpage @http://more2read.com/review/the-killer-inside-me-by-jim-thompson/
