Scan barcode
A review by brandonpytel
The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson
4.0
Picked this short read up for my trip to San Antonio. Figured I’d get a good mix of isolated, sun-drenched, dusty plains before embarking on those same plains myself. In The Killer Inside Me, we meet Lou Ford, a pretty boring deputy sheriff who hides a sinister secret inside him: the sickness.
Throughout the book, that sickness threatens to emerge again, unless tampered down somehow, usually through violent means: “She’d made the old fire burn again. She even showed me how to square with Conway.”
Lou Ford’s past, as we get a little more of it bit by bit, haunts him, and he does his best to hide it. That past keeps surfacing as something to do with his brother, Mike, who took the blame for some unforgivable deed that Lou did as a child. As a result, Mike is eventually killed by Conway, set up as an accident.
The book then is a minor revenge plot to get back at Conway — I say minor, because though that’s the device to keep the narrative moving, it really is about Ford’s sociopathic tendencies and his internal struggle to keep those tendencies in check. But those thoughts lead him to dark places: “I’d get rid of her, and it would all be over for all time.”
Easily the most terrifying scenes, and what makes this a classic crime noir thriller, are Lou Ford’s detachment from his carefully planned murders. He kills with the precision of an assassin, completely separated from his victims, no matter how close he was with them: His lover, his girlfriend, a town bum, Conway’s son — the bodies start piling up.
It is the first murder that really sets the book in motion though, that of a local prostitute who Lou’s taken as a lover, and one of her clients who is in love with her. Yet it doesn't go as planned, and the consequences are lurking in the shadows throughout the book: “I’d done everything I could to get rid of a couple of undesirable citizens in a neat no-kickbacks way. And here one of ‘em was still alive.”
Lou Ford is looking for peace, but looks for it in all the wrong places. He wishes to escape the town, yet gets tangled up in a string of murders as he desperately tries to suffocate his sickness: “He’d had everything, and somehow nothing was better.”
And the sickness instead spreads to outright discomfort for the reader: “It was funny the way these people kept asking for it. Just latching onto you, no matter how you tried to brush them off, and almost telling you how they wanted it done. Why'd they all have to come to me to get killed?”
An exploration of a truly messed-up mind, tainted forever by childhood trauma, The Killer Inside Me is a classic work of crime fiction, one that leaves you turning the page again and again (i literally read this whole book on two flights to Texas), while simultaneously shuttering away from the dark twists and tormented thoughts of its protagonist.
Throughout the book, that sickness threatens to emerge again, unless tampered down somehow, usually through violent means: “She’d made the old fire burn again. She even showed me how to square with Conway.”
Lou Ford’s past, as we get a little more of it bit by bit, haunts him, and he does his best to hide it. That past keeps surfacing as something to do with his brother, Mike, who took the blame for some unforgivable deed that Lou did as a child. As a result, Mike is eventually killed by Conway, set up as an accident.
The book then is a minor revenge plot to get back at Conway — I say minor, because though that’s the device to keep the narrative moving, it really is about Ford’s sociopathic tendencies and his internal struggle to keep those tendencies in check. But those thoughts lead him to dark places: “I’d get rid of her, and it would all be over for all time.”
Easily the most terrifying scenes, and what makes this a classic crime noir thriller, are Lou Ford’s detachment from his carefully planned murders. He kills with the precision of an assassin, completely separated from his victims, no matter how close he was with them: His lover, his girlfriend, a town bum, Conway’s son — the bodies start piling up.
It is the first murder that really sets the book in motion though, that of a local prostitute who Lou’s taken as a lover, and one of her clients who is in love with her. Yet it doesn't go as planned, and the consequences are lurking in the shadows throughout the book: “I’d done everything I could to get rid of a couple of undesirable citizens in a neat no-kickbacks way. And here one of ‘em was still alive.”
Lou Ford is looking for peace, but looks for it in all the wrong places. He wishes to escape the town, yet gets tangled up in a string of murders as he desperately tries to suffocate his sickness: “He’d had everything, and somehow nothing was better.”
And the sickness instead spreads to outright discomfort for the reader: “It was funny the way these people kept asking for it. Just latching onto you, no matter how you tried to brush them off, and almost telling you how they wanted it done. Why'd they all have to come to me to get killed?”
An exploration of a truly messed-up mind, tainted forever by childhood trauma, The Killer Inside Me is a classic work of crime fiction, one that leaves you turning the page again and again (i literally read this whole book on two flights to Texas), while simultaneously shuttering away from the dark twists and tormented thoughts of its protagonist.