The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson

The Plot: The story is told through the eyes of its protagonist, Lou Ford, a 29-year-old deputy sheriff in a small Texas town. Ford seems to be a regular, small-town cop leading an unremarkable existence. Beneath this facade, however, he is a cunning, intelligent and depraved sociopath. (Stolen from Wikipedia)

The Review: Reading a book almost always involves tempering expectations towards what sort of book you’re reading, and while pleasant surprises occur, you’ll generally know what you’re getting into when you pick up a book. With that in mind, no one reads Jim Thompson books and expects anything more than punchy, pulpy stories featuring terrible human beings doing terrible things. Shakespeare, he ain’t, so it shouldn’t be a surprise when you get an enjoyable, but ultimately superficial book that borders on forgettable. While Thompson is renowned within the genre, the problem with his novels is best summarized by the AV Club in an article about gateways to crime fiction, when they wrote “...his novels also suffer from the alcohol-fueled velocity at which he wrote them, and generally fall apart toward the end.”

To his credit, Thompson is able to create a truly chilling character in Ford despite the slapdash method of writing, and reminds the reader that insanity isn’t a complete abandonment of reason or lucidity. When Ford kills women, his psychosis take center stage, but he’s fully cognizant of his actions and in full control of his faculties. The way Thompson was able to balance the insanity with the rational mind is what makes Ford scary and effective as a character. Added to this mix is the fact that Ford is much more passive when killing men, which gives the character his defining characteristic: his misogyny. The undercurrent of misogyny in the murders is particularly horrifying, especially considering I read this book right after reading Margaret Atwood’s very feminist The Handmaid’s Tale. The worldviews between the two authors could not seemingly be farther apart and it was interesting to read the two back to back, inadvertently creating a situation where I felt I was reading the flipsides of two very different coins.

According to the publisher’s website, Thompson wrote the book in four weeks, which ties into the problem the AV Club mentioned above. The book is briskly plotted and the characters well defined, but the book lacks a lot of depth and is hard to review because of it. When I finished The Handmaid’s Tale I was left with a lot of questions that weren’t easily answered. When I finished The Killer Inside Me I was only left with the satisfaction of finishing the book. It may not be fair to compare Thompson directly to Atwood, but hamburgers don’t taste as good if you had filet mignon the night before. If you had an afternoon to kill and wanted a tale of pulp depravity, you could do a lot worse than any of Thompson’s books, but you have to realize you won’t be left with a memorable experience.

Oddly enough, I get the feeling from the book that it would work far better as a movie, where a director with a strong vision would be able to take the pieces of narrative and create a more atmospheric experience for the audience. The news that Casey Affleck is going to star in such a movie as Lou Ford gives me hope for a good movie, but we’ll have to see if those hopes will be validated.

The Package: I’m not overly fussy on the cover, but it’s not terribly offensive either. The placement of the publisher’s logo is questionable and obtrusive though, since it makes it look like Lou Ford has a lizard shaped mole on his face.

If You Liked This: Savage Season by Joe R. Lansdale, the first book to feature his characters Hap and Leonard, who also hail from Texas.

The Rating: Two Casey Afflecks with a terrible mustache out of Five.

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

The Plot: It is the world of the near future, and Offred is a Handmaid in the home of the Commander and his wife. She is allowed out once a day to the food market, she is not permitted to read, and she is hoping the Commander makes her pregnant, because she is only valued if her ovaries are viable. Offred can remember the years before, when she was an independent woman, had a job of her own, a husband and child. But all of that is gone now...everything has changed. (Taken from the Seal Books website)

The Review: To be completely honest, I wasn’t sure I was going to enjoy this book. Since I’m not a fan of most speculative fiction, the subject matter was something that didn’t necessarily interest me, and my memories of reading Atwood in high school were far from rosy. After the first 50 pages or so, I felt a bit validated in my preconceived notions because they were a bit of a slog to get through.

But like many of the beliefs I had in high school, this one also turned out to be baseless.* Simply put, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is far better than I could ever have anticipated, and the novel is proving difficult for me to review since it hasn’t really left me in the few days since I finished reading it. It also turns out that my initial thoughts about the first fifty pages or so were also wrong, because once I finished the novel I re-read those parts and realized that while they are definitely slow, they also do an excellent job of world building. Atwood’s dystopia is a rare case of speculative fiction where everything seems fully realized.

Throughout the novel, Offred remembers her friend Moira, both in the time before and after the United States became the Republic of Gilead. By all accounts, Moira was the spirited one in the relationship, and when the change happened, she was the one to be proactive and attempt an escape. Her character arc seemed to be sliding towards one where she would end up being a symbol of hope for the Handmaids, but her story is just as tragic as any other. The question of what her character represents is a bit troubling to me since Moira doesn’t meet a happy ending, and if she’s supposed to represent the futility of struggling against patriarchal oppression, then I find that a woefully depressing interpretation.

I’ve read some views of Offred where people tend to see her as weak and undeserving of being saved, especially when contrasted against Moira, who was fiercely independent and seemed to be in more in charge of her own fate. I don’t find myself believing that though, because despite whatever faults Offred has, her passivity in relation to the situation handed to her are very much human. It is understandable for someone to distrust a measure of freedom after being indoctrinated against it. She manages to buck the rules when she can, but rather than take chances that would likely find her dead, she instead focuses on surviving. That is what she ends up being in the end, a survivor. Even though she had no idea of their fate, the memory of her husband and daughter is enough to keep her sane, and in the end that is enough.

Perhaps the thing I find most unsettling about the novel is how the attitudes towards women aren’t that far of a stretch from the ones many people hold today, and how they remain believable despite being taken to an extreme. The Republic’s objectification of women and desire to have them be nothing more than child bearers or housewives with no real responsibilities outside of the household is a wonderfully sly condemnation of traditional values by Atwood. Her ability to showcase how actuated ideals can be disastrous and hazardous to society is truly stunning.

Like I said above, this was a hard novel for me to review, so if my thoughts are poorly articulated, I’m sorry.

The Package: The cover itself might be a bit on the nose for the novel thematically, but it’s fairly attractive. Included at the back of the book are discussion questions, an author’s note and interview, and a short overview of Atwood’s career up to that point.

The Score: 4.5 Machines that Margaret Atwood uses instead of signing books herself out of 5.

*For the record, I’ve also come to accept the Russian’s aren’t out to get me.

Queen & Country by Greg Rucka and many others

Owing more to the TV series Spooks than the James Bond or Jason Bourne movies, Greg Rucka’s comic series Queen & Country has managed to carve itself out a niche in a superhero dominated medium by portraying the espionage community with intelligence. What sets the series apart from its counterparts is that while there is plenty of action for the people that crave it, politics and character interaction are the things that propel the plot forward more often than not.

Tara Chace, our protagonist, and the rest of the cast are introduced in the first trade as she attempts to assassinate a Russian arms dealer Kosovo. She gets the job done, and Rucka does a good job of showcasing where he’s going with the rest of the series: brief moments of action followed by the consequences, both in the personal and in the political realm, with a special emphasis on realism. It might seem weird to point to a comic book as being especially realistic, but Rucka does an inordinate amount of research for his scripts, which he provides for the reader as an extra in the third collection.

The interesting thing about the book is how Chace’s gender comes into play. Far too often, it is a trope that women, because of their gender, have to prove themselves worthy in what amounts to a man’s world. This isn’t the case in Q&C, where Chace’s abilities are never called into question unless her performance in the field leaves something to be desired. She’s more than capable and Rucka should be applauded for not saddling his creation with something that’s been beaten to death in other places. Anyone complaining about the lack of strong female characters in comic books would be well advised to pick this book up.

While the four collections are mostly well done, there is at least one niggling problem that would hinder the enjoyment of the series for readers both new and old. In between story arcs, Rucka also added to the Queen & Country series by writing two prose novels, and the third collection suffers because there gaps where the novels took place. Without any explanation as to what happened, certain events remain hazy and uncertain unless the reader is familiar with the novels. The emotional resonance that accompanies the death of a major character is rendered moot because there is no context for the audience to latch onto. This could have been mitigated by adding a simple recap page to the start of each arc, and it’s such a simple addition that it’s surprising the editors didn’t take the time to put it in.

Rating: 3.5 Kate Beckinsales starring in Whiteout out of five. (In the original comic, written by Rucka, a British spy shows up and was originally supposed to be Tara Chace, but once work began on Queen & Country Rucka changed his mind.)

The Given Day by Dennis Lehane

I was, without a doubt, sorely disappointed by Dennis Lehane’s last book, Shutter Island. It was a suspense novel without any tension, and Lehane has no one to blame but himself because it was the writing that let the story down. It was as if he were writing on automatic and figured the gimmicky ending would be enough to get people talking. Unfortunately, the ending was telegraphed far too early and should be easily guessed by anyone with a passing knowledge of the clichés inherent to the genre. This is a shame, since there is a good story buried in there somewhere, but it never materializes into something worth reading. With the talent involved in the movie, there’s a good chance it’ll be one of the rare cases of the film being better than the book.

So there was a large amount of trepidation when I picked up The Given Day almost immediately after finishing Shutter Island, but I was curious to see what Lehane could do given a change of subject matter.

Eschewing his past as a mystery writer, Lehane decided to shift gears and make The Given Day a sprawling 700 page historical epic set in 1919. Using events from the time period, mostly the attempts to unionize the Boston Police Department and the strike that followed, Lehane plays to his strengths and avoids many of the pratfalls from his previous work.

Where Shutter Island had the sense of predictability, The Given Day instead has the sense of inevitability, in regard to both the plot and the character arcs. Each tragedy and triumph that happens to the characters feels earned and organic, and this unto itself should be lauded considering the large cast he manages to flesh out.

I’ve never felt Lehane’s writing could ever be described as anything other than workmanlike, but The Given Day features some of his best writing yet. Many passages bring the era to life, and while no one would ever accuse the prose of being flowery, it provides the reader with a vivid look at a time long past, with all the grime and grittiness that remind the reader that the working conditions in the early 1900s were far from pristine, or even humane.

Perhaps the best compliment I could give to this novel is that reading it made me want to look into the actual events to see how they stack up against what happens in the book. Lehane has said in interviews The Given Day took him six years to research and write and the attention to detail bears that out.

I won’t be happy with it, but if it takes another six years for a book of this quality, I’m willing to wait.

Rating: Four Sean Penns overacting in Mystic River out of Five.