"We might have the disease, the condition; or we might just be cold-blooded and smart as hell; or we might be innocent of what we’re supposed to have done. We might be any one of those three things, because the symptoms we would show would fit any one of the three."
It's been awhile since the most recent film adaptation of The Killer Inside Me came out, and I still haven't seen it...but I will say that like a sucker I got drawn into the controversy and picked up the novel to see what all the original fuss was about. The arguments actually reminded me a bit of the kinds of discussions that went on around American Psycho when it came out (although I would NEVER put these novels even remotely in the same universe in terms of quality or depth), the kinds of dialectical oversimplifications that characterize most debates concerning pop culture: feminist vs. misogynist, too much violence vs. just the right amount, advocating vs. explicating, art vs. exploitative trash. So I picked up the novel and was neither impressed by the way in which Thompson immersed us within the mind of a psychopath - I neither felt complicit in his crimes (or any sense of identification) nor convincing in terms of constructing a character that is compelling enough to carry a novel. Ultimately I found almost everything about this novel flat and progressively obnoxious.
Thompson sketches the narrative in broad strokes; a simple law enforcement officer from a simple town who is expected to marry his simple girlfriend is a ticking time bomb with a history of extreme and irrational violence. Instead of building any kind of tension or even capitalizing on the inevitable curiosity associated with his hidden past and its consequences, Thompson drops us into Lou Ford's stream of consciousness. Lou himself refers to his pathology as "the sickness" and while we wouldn't as readers expect him to be wracked with guilt, he also neither captures the dynamism or capacity for the richness which characterizes even the most dull of mass murderers, psychopaths or serial killers that periodically capture the attention of society. The shock is hinged on Lou Ford's ordinariness, his reputation as a good guy, his identification as a confidant of sorts for some of the townspeople. The narrative is also constructed around two main series of events - the atrocities of his youth and the murders that take center stage of the novel's temporal space connecting these events only through his continual degradation of his girlfriend Amy. The allusions to what is, within the context of the novel, sexual humiliation and abjection on the part of Amy become a kind of trace between his past and present and the intimate link between his sexual proclivities and his blood lust becomes the central driving force and the undertone of the plot. Much has been made of the sexualization of the violence in the film adaptation - well to be more specific I suppose we could say the eroticization. That the link between sex and violence is essential to this story is indisputable, but the mapping of that kind of rage onto a body visually (not to mention the body of Jessica Alba) changes the meaning and reception drastically....but since I haven't seen the film I can't comment further.
People often point, in praise of this book, at the way in which Ford's character is laid out as calculating and rigid, not consumed by rage or passion as one might expect. However, it is important to keep in mind that the novel we are reading is framed as Ford's own retrospective recounting of events. We have no reason to distrust the so called facts of the events that have taken place, since he does nothing to defend or aggrandize, but it is worth considering that his own portrait of his actions might be muted in recollection - had we been along with him in the moment between his urge and the subsequent decision to kill, we might get a significantly different emotional impression of events. To some extent it is possible to get caught up in the plot - watching Ford attempt to cover his tracks and watching him slip under the radar is interesting, but ultimately it all fell flat for me in the face of much more interesting cultural products treating similar issues. I have been told by a friend whose opinions I respect even when we disagree, that this (while the most famous) is not a representative Thompson novel and maybe, someday I will give him another try...but it will probably be awhile.
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