Las dos siempre estuvieron juntas siempre y no puede soportar estar sin ella. Sinopsis: Un libro lleno de intriga y suspense de principio a fin. Una casa perdida en medio del desierto y una familia con unos personajes…. Sinopsis: Cuando estuvo a punto de dejarse llevar por los placer de un matrimonio arreglado con la bella Reiko, Sano es requerido en el palacio….
Lo que menos espera…. El club cotilla encuentra hilarante una tragedia de este tipo. Sinopsis: Mika sufre mientras ve que su hermana se muere ya que no puede vivir sin ella, ni resistir al demonio que las persigue quiere….
Sinopsis: Elmer y Rose han creado una hermosa familia en un remoto paraje, con su casa entre los cactus. Viven felices con sus cinco hijas,…. Sinopsis: Las sombras se obscurecen cuando las mujeres someten a los hombres. Sin embargo, su abuela la convence de pasar sus…. Sinopsis: Roe es muy feliz junto a su prometido Martin Bartell. And despite Ford's obvious dark passenger -- his "sickness" -- you still find yourself rooting for the guy that is when you're not screaming at characters to run for their fucking lives far, far away from the crazy man.
Without Jim Thompson -- and especially without Lou Ford -- I can only believe 'country noir' would not be what it is today. And as readers, so do we. View all 25 comments. Jim Thompson must have had noir in his veins instead of red blood cells. This dark first-person story has the reader inhabiting the mind of a killer in way that most authors can't even come close to matching.
Letting his darker impulses out of the box soon leads Lou to more violence, and then a lengthy cat-and-mouse game with the local power structure as he covers up his crimes with a mixture of his dimwitted persona and even more bloodshed. Reading this is a really odd experience.
Get out of there before he murders you all! View all 6 comments. OH BTW Told in the first person by Lou Ford, who to all outward appearances is a thoughtful, considerate if somewhat slow Deputy Sheriff of Capital City, Texas, population 50, This man will make your skin crawl right off your body.
It is a unique experience to say the least. The deftness and nuance of the writing was amazing. The two things I found most chilling about the story were 1 the complete lack of emotion on the part of Lou as he describes truly despicable acts as if they simply had to be done and 2 his outwardly pleasant demeanor and interaction with the residents in the town while we are aware of how he despises the world around him.
This book will crawl inside you and make you feel like View all 5 comments. I went into this with high expectations. I mean, who doesn't love a good psychopath? Especially one with a boat-load of issues who is in a position of authority and trust. Enter Lou Ford, small town sheriff and all-round good guy But Lou has the sickness.
Most of the time he manages to keep it hidden beneath a cheery and easy-going attitude, most of the time you would assume he is just your average Joe. Until every once in a I went into this with high expectations. Until every once in a while his temper rises and he becomes possessed with an uncontrollable rage Except for the part where I was rather disappointed. The Killer Inside Me isn't a bad book, it was just nowhere near as good as I thought it was going to be.
Lou Ford did not creep me out in the way he was supposed to, he didn't creep me out in the way Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick claim to have been creeped out by him. Dolores Umbridge is creepier than Lou. View all 9 comments. I had not before this read any work by Jim Thompson, though I knew his reputation as a dark and grisly noir novelist from the mid-twentieth century. I had seen The Grifters which I loved , but never read the book on which it was based but now will!
I had recently read a comics adaptation of The Killer Inside, and liked it, so committed to reading the original, which I really did basically love. The Killer Inside Me is the story of Lou Ford, a small town Central City deputy sheriff who appears to be straight-laced and on the surface unremarkable. He has girlfriends, he has other friends, he does good and responsible work, but he allows no one to get close. Lou grew up with a secret, though: He has a sickness that he wants to control.
So can he cure his own sickness? Mistakes were definitely made going down that road. The book has some terrific writing, it is deservedly a classic of the genre, but there are some I warn you disturbing revelations in this book, which he details even as he talks about the weather and so on in a very calm fashion.
For instance, he seems to care very much for a young man, Johnnie; Lou listens to him, he counsels him, but is finally willing to throw him under the bus Okay, not literally but you get the point.
Why does he do it? Is it the result of some early shock? Is it the fact that his mother died when he was young? That he got a step-brother early on, or is it the loss of his step-brother from murder?
He has almost no real insight into himself, which is one really chilling thing about him, of course. He does terrible things and seems to forget them right away! There's a fascinating exchange between Lou and his pragmatic lawyer about whether anyone can accurately be identified as evil. The lawyer says, "The name you give a thing depends on where you are standing.
A weed is just a plant out of place. Because no one, almost no one, sees anything wrong with it. We're living in a funny world, kid, a peculiar civilization. The police are playing crooks in it, and the crooks are doing 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 dough, and the good people are fighting to keep it from us. It's not good for us, know what I mean? I guess that kind of crap is supposed to be pretty deep stuff—a lot of the book reviewers eat it up, I notice. But the way I see it is, the writer is just too goddam lazy to do his job. I do ver much recommend it, but it's disturbing in places at the same time being very well-written. It's a classic, surely, I'll say, one of the top ten noir classics ever.
View all 10 comments. Recommended to Lawyer by: Members of goodreads group Pulp Fiction. Shelves: 20th-century , murder , suspense , first-person-narrative , fiction , anti-social-personality , good-and-evil , absence-of-conscience , sex , psychology.
The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul? Monsters are variations from the accepted normal to a greater or a less degree. As a child may be born without an arm, so one may be born without kindness or the potential of conscience. A man who loses his arms in an accident has a great struggle to adjust himself to the lack, but one born without arms suffers only from people who find him strange.
Having never had arms, he cannot miss them. To a monster the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself. To the inner monster it must be even more obscure, since he has no visible thing to compare with others. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous. And the people at that publishing company got it right. My grandmother had a saying it was always easy to know someone who wasn't right.
But I think Steinbeck nails it. Because you can't always tell you're dealing with a monster. Because the face and body may be perfect. They are not physical monsters, no freak at the side show at the carnival. These people walk among us, looking and acting just the way we do, day to day. That is conscience. That is a value for the difference between right and wrong. Take Jim Thompson's protagonist, Lou Ford.
He's a deputy sheriff. He's the go to guy when it gets down to getting someone to talk. He's a natural at it, mouthing platitudes, assuring his suspects that he's their friend. He's respected by his sheriff. Casey Affleck as Lou Ford in the film directed by Michael Winterbottom However, when Lou feels the sickness, as he calls it coming on, he says he can't control himself.
Perhaps you say Lou Ford was criminally insane. Not so. Lou knew the difference between right and wrong. He didn't give a damn. And when he determined it in his best interest, if people had to die, well, they were already dead in his book. Lou is a careful planner. He is a craftsman at construction of alibis. Adept at creating evidence pointing in anyone's direction but him, he's capable of covering his tracks well.
Murder is not something that gnaws at his conscience, because he lacks one. Killing two people and covering his own skin, Lou returns home to his father's house where he prepares and wolfs down a large breakfast of ham and eggs.
He's not squeamish. I can't fault Jim Thompson for the psychology he cites accurately, the material that was commonly referred to at the time of his writing The Killer Inside Me Emil Kraepelin, whose works Lou Ford studies in his father's medical library is credited with the birth of modern psychiatric diagnoses.
However Ford singles out Kraepelin's work on dementia praecox the precursor for what we now know as Schizophrenia. That diagnosis is a psychosis, amounting to a break with reality and a failure to recognize reality. A common description of defining a person's mental status is whether he is oriented x 3, that is, to person, place and time. That does not ever fit Lou Ford. He's conscious of person place and time at all times. It's his "moral" compass that's broken. Emil Kraepelin, Lou Ford's favorite author Lou Ford's personality is described with unerring accuracy in Kraepelin's later work, which would have been available to Jim Thompson, under sections dealing with moral insanity.
From wikipedia: In fact from Kraepelin changed the section heading to 'The born criminal', moving it from under 'Congenital feeblemindedness' to a new chapter on 'Psychopathic personalities'. They were treated under a theory of degeneration. Four types were distinguished: born criminals inborn delinquents , pathological liars, querulous persons, and Triebmenschen persons driven by a basic compulsion, including vagabonds, spendthrifts, and dipsomaniacs.
The concept of 'psychopathic inferiorities' had been recently popularised in Germany by Julius Ludwig August Koch, who proposed congenital and acquired types. Kraepelin had no evidence or explanation suggesting a congenital cause, and his assumption therefore appears to have been simple 'biologism'. Others, such as Gustav Aschaffenburg, argued for a varying combination of causes. Kraepelin's assumption of a moral defect rather than a positive drive towards crime has also been questioned, as it implies that the moral sense is somehow inborn and unvarying, yet it was known to vary by time and place, and Kraepelin never considered that the moral sense might just be different.
Kurt Schneider criticized Kraepelin's nosology for appearing to be a list of behaviors that he considered undesirable, rather than medical conditions, though Schneider's alternative version has also been criticised on the same basis. Nevertheless, many essentials of these diagnostic systems were introduced into the diagnostic systems, and remarkable similarities remain in the DSM-IV and ICD Emphasis added If there is anything in modern psychology that rings true, it deals with the development of sexuality.
It is borne out be current research in the field that an adult's aberrant sexual behavior is often set during adolescence by the occurrence of a sexual event which leads the target of that event to recreate situations similar to those experienced in adolescence. So, perhaps whatever happened between Lou and his father's housekeeper, bent Lou a little crooked in his interactions with women in his adult years.
And, of course, we know of his experience with a three year old girl up in the barn loft for which his foster brother took the blame. We also know that Dr. Foster knew of his son's aberrations, keeping him close under wraps, at home in Central City, Texas. So, if you want to know what runs through the mind of a killer, Jim Thompson's novel is the one for you. Don't blame me if it sends a chill up your spine every few chapters are so.
And, when you're finished with this book, don't take too much comfort that it's only a story. For there are monsters that walk among us and sometimes they look just perfect out of their eyes. View all 24 comments. Shelves: crime-fiction. Thompson seems to have serious Mommy issues, as all his women, be they whores or schoolmarms, are shrewish harpies. AND, he seems to believe that a good beating is the only foreplay a woman should ever need.
He is not alone in his cringe-worthy treatment of the ladies. It seems to be a common problem that has bugged the hell out of me in other books of this ilk and is probably the main reason "It's always lightest just before the dark It seems to be a common problem that has bugged the hell out of me in other books of this ilk and is probably the main reason I don't read more noir.
If you can ignore the quite literal female bashing here, this is a remarkably intriguing and arresting story, and a fascinating look inside the mind of a psychopath. View all 14 comments. The cover of my edition is a plain tan-ish color, with just the title, the author, a few small pictures of sheriff stars, revolvers and bottles lined in a row and then a quote of praise that takes up about a third of the cover. This is the story of Lou Ford. She was getting on my nerves, hanging around so much.
But she wouldn't be hanging around long, so I thought I ought to be as nice as I could. Ladies and gentlemen, this book starts off classic noir and moves straight into horror territory. This feels… grittier, darker, something I would expect more out of an author in the 70s who wanted to mirror stylistic touches from the past.
He smiles and acts the fool to people, all of them knowing what a big soft hearted fellow he is, all while planning out what he is going to do next. He often tries to justify his actions, trying to make the reader sympathetic towards him. Obviously it was his childhood, or maybe was his father, or maybe it's the way society acts, or maybe all of the above. 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?
Why couldn't they kill themselves? It is also a shockingly funny novel, which makes it even more uncomfortable, as you see how easy it is for Lou to disarm people. This managed to creep me out in a way American Psycho never did, as unlike Bateman, I found myself sometimes liking Lou. And that dear readers, is truly a frightening thing. A well deserved 4 out of 5 stars and a full recommendation. This was a humdinger of a story written through the eyes of a sheriff Lou Ford of a small, middle-of-nowhere west Texas town of Central City.
Is he an easy-going, well-liked man and a respected citizen of the town, well known for his quiet, gentle nature? On the inside he has a dark-side he is a sociopathic killer who seems to think that life is ruled by any means necessary, full of both corny, small-town bonhomie and murderous psychosexual rage.
He will not hesitate to eliminate his loved ones This was a humdinger of a story written through the eyes of a sheriff Lou Ford of a small, middle-of-nowhere west Texas town of Central City.
He will not hesitate to eliminate his loved ones with brutal emotional dis-attachment. In the following discussion in the novel he is describing his perspective on life.
How can a man ever really know anything? Were living in a funny world, kid, a peculiar civilisation. The bad people want us to have more dough, and the good people are fighting to keep it from us.
It's not good for us, know what i mean? If we all had all we wanted to eat, we'd crap too much. We'd have inflation in toilet paper industry. That's the way i understand it. That's about the size of some of the arguments i've heard. A time to sow and a time to reap. A time to live and a time to die" Jim Thompson creates a main protagonist that you get to like, but at the same time he has a side to him we would all hate.
Thompson tries to show us that the cliched perspective of s America as a land of communal benevolence and white picket fences requires attention. Paper thin, with a cancerous presence under the skin from the actions of 'evil that men do. While he seems at the same time to explain his reasons for his actions he does not quite understanding why he treads that path, he tries to understand himself in his story by digging out a quote out of a psychology textbook.
On the contrary, his behaviour appears to be entirely logical. He reasons soundly, even shrewdly. He is completely aware of what he does and why he does it The movie adaptation recently was good but had some brutal images.
Psyched Out! In a small Texas town, you know, the kind that reminds you of Mayberry, Lou Ford is the nicest Sherrif around. Dismally, he is afflicted with catastrophic luck.
Everyone he knows and love seems to get brutally murdered! Wonder how his investigation is going? View 2 comments.
Shelves: favourites , This book is riveting. General consensus ties our current era of rudderless moral drift into incoherent and incongruous direction to the sounding knell of overt rebelliousness in the s, but it seems, in fact, a lot of groundwork was being laid quietly but decisively in the 50s. Its writers like Thompson who broke with established zeitgeist in the 50s and kickstarted the momentum culminating in the total anti-thesis of the status quo in the 60s.
Lou Ford is the quintessential psychopath, a bogeyman: he gives me the shivers across a fifty year divide, he is that fresh. And relevant. Lou is a damaged, sad human being who epitomises, on some level, the universal sense of guilt imbued in all of us who are products of the year old judeo-christian legacy, and particularly in relation to sex bearing in mind this novel came out in the s.
Psychologically gripping and disturbing, this book is unputdownable. I read this because I saw that Stephen King recommended it. Any thoughts I have would simply be superfluous. This is a slightly tricky book to rate and review. I want to give at least a minor warning as I think some readers will find the book to some extent disturbing. The writing could be called masterful. This novel was written in Other than a few terms that are obsolete the story holds up well and in no way really feels dated.
I mean yeah we have older cars, limited phone availability and a '50s society but it doesn't "jump out This is a slightly tricky book to rate and review. As a side note there is a movie adaption of this book. I have never seen it so I can't comment on it. I do know the movie was roundly criticized for violence against women. As I said I haven't seen the movie, but if the movie stays true to the book there's no way to avoid that. Lou Ford is somewhat of a psychopathic sadist. The book is told from Lou's point of view and the most frightening thing about it is Lou's voice.
He's so normal and everybody likes him. Lou on the other hand has known all along about the monster that's imprisoned inside him, he's struggled to keep it there. He's been careful for years to keep it chained. The book will take us on a guided tour of Lou's descent into madness. We get a front row seat to his mind. He moves among his friends, his neighbors and no one knows who I don't want to do that. I do want you to know however that you'll get some graphic violence still not as graphic as some more modern books but it gets the job done.
It's emotionally straining and emotionally draining but it's extremely well written. I can recommend it with certain reservations. The Killer Inside Me is one of those novels that needs no introduction at all -- it is and will always be a classic of American noir fiction, it's been made into two movies and , and chances are that if you haven't read the novel you've at least seen the film. Or, if you're really fainthearted, you've experienced neither, since both book and movie are dark, disturbing, and well past the point of unsettling.
It's also one of those books that has been studied left and right, inside and The Killer Inside Me is one of those novels that needs no introduction at all -- it is and will always be a classic of American noir fiction, it's been made into two movies and , and chances are that if you haven't read the novel you've at least seen the film.
It's also one of those books that has been studied left and right, inside and out, and has even been the subject of a number of dissertations. This book is extremely difficult to read because of the sadistic, misogynistic violence yes, I know The novel is Lou's confession, if you will, his way of trying to make us understand the logic behind his actions, laying out his plans ahead of time for our perusal, and revealing just how he is able to fool people so easily -- until he can't any more.
There is so much to this novel aside from the violence, but going through everything I discovered in this book would take forever. As I said earlier, this novel has been scrutinized, studied, written about academically and otherwise, so there are a number of places to dig out more about it. It's up there among books that made me want to take a shower after reading it, but it's so damn good I just couldn't stop. And that sort of scares me, actually. Insanely good, but to be very honest, I liked his Pop.
View all 7 comments. This was my orginal thoughts with which I was never satisfied: Until I saw this my gut feeling was that it would be impossible to take Jim Thompson to the screen, but I stand corrected. Like most people, I guess, my re This was my orginal thoughts with which I was never satisfied: Until I saw this my gut feeling was that it would be impossible to take Jim Thompson to the screen, but I stand corrected.
In both of these I recall violence against men. It diminishes the nature of violence, it does desensitise, it does make it normal, even as we complain about it. There we were talking about the fact that a picture can give an impression which if read instead would be found cheap and coarse.
At the time I suggested that the reverse would surely sometimes be true, that a nasty picture could be ennnobled by a description in words and this kept coming back to me in the movie. One of the things Thompson does is describe violence in the most gripping, gut-wrenching way which makes one feel there and part of it. I say that as one who finds descriptions of violence generally tedious, both visual and by word.
His writing of this kind of thing is staggeringly good. I wish more film directors understood that suggestion is so much more powerful than blatancy. Maybe this is because in the end, in a movie, you are watching rather than taking part in the way you are when reading. Jim Thompson, out of favour for decades, has suddenly become flavour of the month, his books are back in mainstream print and now this movie.
They are part of a movement of mid-to-late-twentieth century studies of sociopaths which are, in my opinion, a very important part of the literature of that period.
So get trendy and read him…and yes, by all means see the movie too. End of initial thoughts. And express a reconsideration. In retrospect, I consider the way in which the violence was portrayed here to be absolutely legitimate. Maybe there are other ways of doing it that would have worked. I think of the film The Boys in which there is almost no explicit violence and yet the threat looms far larger than the execution. But still, in order to get inside the head of the killer I can see that the approach taken by the director maybe worked in a way that was utterly horrific but still meaningful.
I do not think that of either Pan's Labyrinth or Red Riding Trilogy where the violence served no purpose whatsoever. It was watching the movie of this book that gave me one of those moments of understanding.
There are the ones who say what they believe, who say what they mean. Then there are the ones who believe what they say, who mean what they say.
This second group is convinced that their very act of saying something makes it true. He explains as he is doing it that he has to do it, it cannot be helped and, of course, he has said it, therefore in his view of the world, it is true. In a deeply moving moment as the woman is lying on the floor, dying, a gentle pool of her urine growing on the floor, she reaches for her handbag. Is there something with which to belatedly defend herself in there? She dies first. Later we find that she was reaching to find a letter she had for this man, her love.
She loved the man who was kicking her to death. Not at any point did that love waver. It was strength, not weakness that we witnessed in this scene. She loved this man.
She wanted to deliver her letter. I find Jim Thompson's perspective extraordinary. It is mean-spirited, diabolical, subversive yet bursting with a kind of honesty that is chilling in its simplicity. Lou Ford is a deputy Sheriff by day and a sociopath by night. Thompson is not the first author to put the reader in the head of a demented killer, Dorothy B.
Hughes preceded him by a few years with In a Lonely Place. But Thompson manages to do something special here. Ford is by far the most logical character in the book.
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