With Thompson’s penchant for peculiar/disturbing endings it is fair to question the reality of the finale in this book. Such foreknowledge from the film that she isn’t dead obviously destroys the twist at the book’s end: this is when we should find out Joyce is in fact alive, dramatically if deeply disturbing by her entry and what she says to Lou.

Even on the second successful one, the impact of seeing the film was destructive: because the critical narrative ruse is the fact that Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford thinks the first woman he brutally assaulted is dead, told so by his friend and the sheriff Bob Maples, and this is what gives him the confidence to carry on killing because he has not been linked to her death. I think my initial hesitancy was much to do with having seen the film version near that first reading. Written in 1952, this first person portrayal of the behaviour of a sociopath/psychopath in small-town America must have been then, and still is, both a frightening insight into the mind of a killer as well as a metaphor for the evil that can exist within an ostensibly ‘normal’ person and place, anywhere.Ĭited by many as Thompson’s best work, I had to take a second run at reading in order to become wholly involved and to finish.

The killer inside me book summary