Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant
Review: If you like crime fiction or true crime, buy this book. Read it. There's really no point in my waffling on at length: it's just plain brilliant.
Rating: 
Summary: Jim Thompson: Unheralded Master
Review: It is time people woke up and gave this man his due. Whenever I think of the current crop of so-called "mystery" or "thriller", my stomach turns to think that people read the kind of pablum that a writer like Sue Grafton spews out of her money-making writing machine. Thompson is a man who wrote real people in real situations and never once did he slip on their psychology. Lou Ford is a small-town Texas sheriff who deep-down possesses a desire to kill again and again and he doesn't hold it in because he doesn't want to. Here is a character who is the Id embodied, and when you read his thoughts you feel that he is all there but at the same time the undercurrent of his psychosis pulls at you a little. As the book progresses, Lou slips deeper into his bloodlust until it eventually ruins him. A great surprise ending and a convincingly-portrayed destruction of a regular Joe who just has to kill.
Rating:
Summary: Do You Have THE SICKNESS?
Review: In a strange and sleepy middle of nowhere town called Central City, a middle of the road going nowhere kind of police sheriff, Lou Ford, seems to be ambling towards the finish of yet another any old kind of day exactly like yesterday. A routine call to a house where he is to warn the owner, a prostitute, to cool it or be sent packing, changes Lou's life. In a taunting moment the prostitute slaps our Sheriff, and that slap unleashes "the Sickness" which floods over Lou and his world like the hot kiss at the end of a wet fist. Stanley Kubrick praised the Killer Inside Me for its realistic depiction of a criminally warped mind. Not for the faint of soul. Read it.
Rating:
Summary: Old But Great
Review: An 'amazon.com' reader who had seen my review of my favourite book 'American Psycho' (by Bret Easton Ellis) recommended me Jim Thompson's 'The Killer Inside Me'.Well, I would not compare Thompson's novel to Ellis' writing style, in no way. Still, 'The Killer Inside Me', in all its simplicity, is a thrilling an exciting crime story that it is very hard to put aside, once you have started reading it! It tells the straight-forward story of a deputy-sheriff who kills the people who get in the way of his private life. Nevertheless, and since you see the happenings from inside the deputy's head, he is not exactly unsympathetic. In fact, he is so caring and intelligent, that it grows to serious mental illness. And even though 'The Killer Inside Me' takes place in the 1950s, it might as well be contemporary. Nothing in the story makes it outdated. A brilliant bedtime crime story! Easily and quickly read!
Rating:
Summary: Warning! Hitchhikers May Be Escaped Lunatics!!
Review: Nearly 20 years ago, I came upon an omnibus edition of Thompson published by Zomba (a British company). It was my first taste of Thompson, and whatta sampler: THE GETAWAY, THE KILLER INSIDE ME, THE GRIFTERS and POP. 1280!!! (Oh how I wish I'd never loaned it out.) Too late now; the word's out on Thompson, but THE KILLER INSIDE ME was worth buying twice. The secret ingredient of this and most of Thompson's best novels is a simple one: a drawling, folksy, intensely likable first-person narrator who not only draws you into the story but effortlessly wins your confidence, slowly, slowly, by small increments, turns into a deranged psychopath - and suddenly, it dawns on the reader that: a)this character has been deranged from the first page; and b)ALL your preconceived notions about characters, settings and situations in the novel may be dreadfully wrong. Geoffrey O'Brien calls this Thompson specialty the "sucker punch in which the bottom drops out of everything". Re-reading this book, I was again floored by his mastery of the trap-door, essentially switching narrative gears so fluidly that he achieves something beyond suspense: call it profound unease behind a mask of utter, banal normalcy. Strangely (though somewhat apropos for a writer who toiled in obscurity, unheralded till long after his death), many readers -corrupted by that NY Review of Books worldview which posits that only elegant prose is worthwhile prose- still dismiss his best work, while praising his many imitators and literary descendants (who had the luxury of reading Thompson in order to work more stylized variations of his effects). But don't be fooled by these snuff-box 'realists': there's more gritty and nightmarish authenticity in this novel (and many others he wrote) than in a stack of the more 'literary' wannabes who followed in his wake. When Lou Ford grinds his cigar into a beggar's outstretched palm, laughing like hell, you'll feel a jolt of electricity and danger few books can deliver, regardless of whether this was first published as a 25-cent paperback original or not. Buy this book and be on the lookout for his others.
Rating:
Summary: He's a Ford not a Lincoln
Review: Lou Ford is the prototype for all those psycho-killers we've seen done and overdone in book and film in the past 20 years. He's sick, yet can justify everything he does. He lives in your neighborhood and "protects" the streets. The scary part is the reader starts to agree with him! "...why do they have to come to me to get killed?"
Rating:
Summary: A Detailed Study of The Sociopath
Review: Forget words like 'hard-boiled' and 'noir'. This is one of the finest studies of the sociopathic mind ever written. By using the interior monologue that Thompson is uniquely gifted to use, the reader is carried along on a wave of abject violence unlike any other in literature. It is truly a carnival ride through the fun house, except it isn't fun. The darkness is truly a revelation of character. Maybe the Killer is inside all of us. With Thompson's brilliant writing, it feels possible. This is the type of horror that Stephen King would be proud of.
Rating: 
Summary: Bland by today's standards
Review: While I read "Killer Inside of Me" a few months ago I can barely remember much about it. This novel was originally released in the 1950's when it was probably a very shocking book. At that time very few, if any, writers were writing about sociopaths (except maybe Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood" - which by the way, is STILL an excellent novel) so maybe Jim Thompson struck a nerve however in today's society where sociopath is a common word and to see violence all we need do is turn on the local news - this novel seems bland and outdated. While Thompson used some amazing techniques to talk about the killer inside deputy Lou Ford, the inner monologue can sometimes be tedious. Like Hitchcock, Thompson used the first person narrative to show how normal Lou seems to the world and how rational he is about the killing. He makes the reader take Lou's side instead of seeing him as a monster. This novel is certainly a good read if you remember when it was written and that it is probably the basis for many of the popular murder mystery novels today and Thompson is one of a few writers that paved the way for today's popular authors. I read a bunch of the other reviews here and was surprised to see people raving about how amazing the book is. I must say I don't agree. This book is a decent read, less interesting in the sense of the plot but more interesting when looked at in the context of it's place within the "History of Mystery".
Rating:
Summary: Good book
Review: This is a quick-paced, relatively short novel that purportedly amounts to "probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered" (quote by Stanley Kubrick on front cover). While I think this is a great overstatement, I did find the book very engaging and entertaining. I don't think it conveyed a terribly nuanced or deep evocation of sociopathic thinking, and I found parts of the book to be a bit confusing and obscure in their use of indirect language. But it is a solid, classic choice that maintains its suspense and that successfully evokes a different time, place, and culture.
Rating: 
Summary: Deconstructive Criticism
Review: Rootie toot toot diddlie dee diddlie dum dip dip doo (that's my opinion of this book)
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