Possibly even better than Pop. 1280, but essentially it's the same conceit - first person, unreliable narrator, manipulating his readers in to feeling sorry for him whilst going about his immoral business, in this case lots of cold blooded murder.

Fascinating and dark, Thompson grabs you with his tale of good ol' boy Lou Ford and you don't want to be let go, even when the house is burning up around you. Ford is more intelligent than everyone around him, but he has a dark secret in his past and a sickness in his head that has forced him to remain in his small town his whole life, hiding that cunning intellect by playing the fool. He needlessly ribs people by playing at the corny buffoon act, brow beating them with such humdingers as "the way I look at it, a man doesn't get any more out of life that what he puts in to it," and "it came to me out of a clear sky - the boy is the father to the man. Just like that, the boy is the father to the man."

It's got me wondering whether half of the people I have to deal with in my bookshop are secretly psychopathic killers out to wind me up or whether they are genuinely that much of a buffoon. And that's a completely separate wondering to 'just why was I identifying with that serial killer, is it because I too am a capable of such savage and uncaring violence?'

It really makes a mockery of the hoopla surrounding Bret Easton Ellis to see such incendiary material of far superior literary quality without the bells and whistles being written so far in advance of American Psycho.

I think this works as a fine companion piece to Charles Willeford's Pick-Up, but there's a chance that after reading both in quick succession you may want to take a holiday with unicorns and rainbows and long walks on the beach, that will of course be the overdose of prescription painkillers and gallons of hard liquor working on you after you decide that life isn't worth living anymore.