The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson

Researching for something to read during an upcoming weekend in Marfa, I googled “the best psychological thrillers ever” and The Killer Inside Me popped up in the top three of every list I found.

The Killer Inside Me is about the chillingly sociopathic Lou Ford, deputy sheriff in a small Texas town in the 1950s, who has a secret need for sadomasochistic sex with compliant women. And he really must kill the people he loves, and anyone who gets in his way, but in disturbingly interesting ways. The fact that I, and many others, enjoyed this book so much is more than a little unsettling. I think (hope) it was the exceptional writing that was the book’s hook and the interesting perspective provided through the first person telling of the story, but I also think that humans have an innate curiosity about things they would never do.

Just to give you an idea of how “rough” this book is (as my mom would say), it and the movie have been described as “misogynist hate-porn with a fancy wrapper.” The movie has even been criticized in Europe where just about anything goes. Hitchcock’s shower stabbing scene in Psycho, which is pretty much the same hate-woman-kill theme as in The Killer Inside Me, doesn’t seem as brutal as what is portrayed by Thompson.

One Hundred Things My Mother Taught Me a Million Times - Chapter 73

(Photo is of my son Colt, his partner Heather, and her two daughters, Taylor and Gracie. There's also a baby bump on Heather that is my newest granddaughter, scheduled to arrive in early October!)

#73 - When blankets get old and thin, patch them together.

If I had a backbone I would have buried my mother with an old blue blanket she loved and had patched so many times that it was as soft as a baby blanket. However, I couldn’t seem to get her in a coffin and in the ground fast enough. This is a very emotional confession for me, and I knew it would be when I saw #73 come up on the list of things mom taught me a million times. The reason I was in such a hurry to bury my mom was because it was so very painful to see her dead, and I’d been looking at her dead for a year. Not physically dead, but mentally – or so it seemed. She progressively lost her ability to talk, to recognize her family, to make eye contact, or to do anything that seemed familiar. It just didn’t feel like she was “in there,” and I was pretty convinced she wasn’t. But let’s talk about patching blankets, because I really don’t want to cry.