I recently finished a book by the crime writer Jim Thompson. If his name is unfamiliar to you, you may have seen one of the films of one of his books: The Getaway, The Grifters or The Killer Inside Me. Or maybe you saw his scripts filmed by Stanley Kubrick: The Killing or Paths of Glory. Or maybe this is the first time you’re hearing about him.
His stories are peopled with characters who are so twisted, so damaged that one cannot turn away from the story. It’s like each person he’s writing is such a train wreck that to not look is impossible. Pop. 1280 is the most twisted thing I’ve read since The Killer Inside Me. In Killer, you’re as involved as the main character in every depraved act that’s committed, complicit in the crimes. The same is true in 1280, but he adds a layer of racism that’s beyond uncomfortable and it’s even uncomfortable in the mind of the narrator.
Each book, written in first person, puts the reader deep inside a main character’s insidious brain squirming with creeping tendrils of evil and malice disguised as rational thought. It’s unnerving, to say the least. I couldn’t stop reading. I had to know what was going to happen next.
Dropping compelling characters into bizarre circumstances is certainly one way to keep me engaged in a story and Pop. 1280 is a master class in how to do it. Each chapter ends not just on a cliffhanger, but with the expectation that while that may be a nice place to stop you’d better not. If you do — well, let’s just say that no matter what you think might happen next it won’t hold a candle to what does happen. It’s not the shock value that kept me reading, it was that the darker the places his characters went the more it made sense. He drew me deeply into those parts of my psyche that I don’t often go. (more…)