He didn’t hide from it in his own life, and he certainly won’t let you hide from it either. Thompson lays their souls out in front of you, complete and unadulterated, with no attempt to make their lives more palatable. Beyond that, however, it is a novel about some very broken people who positively wallow in their own dark hearts. It is, after all, a pulp novel, and must necessarily cater to the audience’s expectation for mass-produced sexual deviance. As the puerile pun of the book’s title will attest to, Thompson’s novel is also gleefully immature. It’s a disturbing portrait of a true sociopath, a small-town deputy with a psychosexual disturbance so big you could hang your 10-gallon hat on it. One of the great joys of Jim Thompson’s hard-boiled 1952 crime thriller The Killer Inside Me is its unflinching Freudianism.
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