I was sold by the effusive Stephen King intro and wasn't disappointed. This depiction of a monster hiding in plain sight is powerful stuff, taut and uncompromising and straight to the neck. The tale of Lou Ford grips and intrigues, providing just enough detail while not shying away from the violence and it's riveting.

I've had the strongest sense of déjà vu reading this yet I can't see any record of me having read it before. Perhaps it predated my reading diary but that puts it quite a way back. Maybe the classic nature just feels familiar now. Well worth reading.

Not poorly written but pretty nasty. I noped out about 20% of the way in.

Simply put, Jim Thompson’s 1952 novel The Killer Inside Me is a stunner, one of those novels that, once picked up, demand the reader to keep turning pages. Mostly during the 1930s and 1940s, Thompson wrote over thirty novels, and most of those, including The Killer Inside Me, were published as paperback originals. That’s probably why Thompson got so little critical appreciation during his lifetime. He was, however, “rediscovered” during the 1980s, and several of his novels have now been filmed or republished. The Killer Inside Me even opens the Library of America collection titled Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s, a five-novel collection that includes Patricia Highsmith’s remarkable The Talented Mr. Ripley along with works from the classic noir writers Charles Willeford, David Goodis, and Chester Himes.

“I grinned, feeling a little sorry for him. 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?”

Twenty-nine-year-old Lou Ford, narrator of The Killer Inside Me, is a cop in the small West Texas town he’s lived in his whole life. Central City, Texas, is an oil boom town that has grown from a population of 4,800 to one of more than 48,000 during Lou’s lifetime, and it is not anything like the quiet little community it had been when his father was the town’s family doctor. Lou is the cop everybody likes, the guy who doesn’t appear to be all that smart but always has the time and good advice for those who need it most. And that’s just the way Lou wants it.

The real Lou Ford, however, is nothing like the one people think he is. No, the real Lou Ford is brilliant. He reads in several languages, a feat he taught himself by reading from the extensive library his father left behind in the family home/doctor’s office after he died. He’s read his father’s medical texts — and he’s completely conversant about their contents. With his photographic memory, Lou could have easily become a doctor and taken over his father’s established practice had he wanted to do that. But most importantly, the real Lou Ford is a psychopath who is just as likely to kill you as smile at you and quote some homespun advice he’s memorized from his reading. He’s a man who, entirely for his own amusement, manipulates everyone unfortunate enough to know him. And the really scary thing is what he’s capable of doing to the people he grows tired of — or those who make the mistake of crossing him.

Lou Ford is an unforgettable narrator who, despite his mental illness, turns out to be the exact opposite of the unreliable narrator. Instead, Lou wants the reader (often addressing them directly) to know exactly what he is thinking and planning — even to telling them that he is going to kill someone long before he actually does it. He is a brutal, violent man in the midst of losing the self-control that has allowed the killer inside him to remain hidden as long as it has. But that is about to change…and the body-count is mounting.

“…the way I see it is, the writer is just too goddam lazy to do his job. And I’m not lazy, whatever else I am. I’ll tell you everything. But I want to get everything in the right order. I want you to understand how it was.”

Bottom Line: The Killer Inside Me is a surprisingly disturbing novel, but the disturbance does not necessarily come from the explicitness of Lou Ford’s murders. I was much more taken aback by —the ease with which a man like Lou Ford (and his real life versions) is so easily able to lure innocent victims into his web of murder and abuse. The horror of that ability is magnified by the ease — and pleasure — that Ford takes in giving his readers such a revealing account of how easy it is for someone like him to kill — and get away with it.

Throbbing. Pathetic. Perfect. What a book.

I read this book in my hardboiled fiction/film noir class and fucking loved it. I will tell you why.

I loved the first person narrative. It is the perfect example of an unreliable narrator. You are in his mind, and, in reading his atrocious acts in first person, you want to find a point of sympathy with him. How else can you manage to say "I" throughout all these brutal beatings/killings? That's what tends to happen with our experience in crime fiction, no? Even in real crime stories...the ones we read, see in the news, etc., we need to know WHY so-and-so did it. Even if it's just a simple explanation, such as "insanity," to write it off. We want to know "What happened in this person's past/childhood/life for them to do such a deed and take pleasure (or no pleasure) in it?"

Lou is a smart guy. He toys with the characters in the novel who think he is not a bright man. He condescends without them even knowing. He definitely knows how to play off of people's expectations; but not just the characters', the readers' as well. And this, I tell you, is where I have such high regard for this book. I love psychological crime and forensic psychology theories and all the like. Lou gives you plenty of sympathetic reasonings....you just gotta take your pick! But could he just be playing with the reader? Very meta.

Maybe there is no reason to his evilness. But it's subjective right? Morality is not an objective set of rules. What about the social contract? Lou has no need for it. He submits to the social contract with his facade. But he will continue to do what he wants. While we sit, read, and try to make sense of this killer. Laughing at the way he mocks the low-brow characters (according to him). Until we realize...he's also laughing at us.

2.5
No estuvo tan mal para tratarse de un psicópata. Lo malo, es que como iba viendo las cosas a través de él, no tuve esa emoción por saber lo que pasaría así que al final me termino aburriendo.