Title: Poorly written and tedious.
Product review: Jim Thompson achieved a measure of posthumous fame in the 1990's with the reissue of a number of his books. The best thing I can say about this one is that the publisher did a great job of packaging the book. Thompson's writing style is very awkward. To the extent the book has any interest at all, it is in its attempt to tell a story from the point of view of a sociopath. This is not an easy thing to do, and I don't think Thompson pulls it off. There moments of black humor in the book. However, most of the time I felt that Thompson was simply doing the best he could to shock the reader, without much attempt to put together a believable story. The violence in the book, while probably extreme at the time it was published, is really not that bad given what is being written now or shown in films. Rather, the fault of the book is that, as hard as it tries to be shocking, ultimately it is boring.
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