As a standalone excerpt, something like this could be straight out of a middlebrow bestseller full of tepid, homespun maxims:

"I guess mostly what I mean is that there can't be no personal hell because there aren't no personal sins. They're all public, George, we all share in the other fellas' and the other fellas all share in ours."

It's got a palatable message about community and shared culpability, presented in a stylized folksy voice that so often portends an enervating inspirational message. But even though it only dawned on me gradually—and the unhurried aspect of the bleakness only heightens the intensity—this is a masterfully venomous little book. Even the frequent humor is something of a feint, affecting lightheartedness but spiteful at its core.

Jim Thompson takes familiar conventions (an aw-shucks simpleton sheriff in a tightly-knit, God-fearing town was already run of the mill in the 1960s, thanks in large part to epigones of the Depression-era greats) and uses them to plunge heels-up into the id of the 1910's American South. The menacing, vindictive, and antisocial impulses beneath the charming facade of small-town life are common enough artistic fare, but rarely does it turn out this relentless and grim. This is largely due to to Sheriff Nick Corey, the narrator, whose doltishness and candor would make him the best candidate for moral rectitude in a dime-store novel. But his eventual revelation leads him not toward righteousness, but instead to capitulation to his actual social function as lawman, which is "to punish the heck out of people for bein' people." True to life, those punished most severely are the ones already on the periphery of this small society. His badge doesn't represent a counterforce against violence and cruelty; instead, it sanctions him to inflict those pains as he sees fit.

The readers' unmediated access to the sheriff via first-person access is one of the most interesting aspects of the book. Typically, if a character in a novel behaves and speaks like a dimwit but manages to routinely hatch elaborate plots leading to the downfall of others, it's presented as a sort of sleight of hand gimmick. Formula dictates that there's a more sophisticated Self on the inside, one capable of machinations leading toward some ultimate premeditated purpose. The public persona is just one among many deliberate ruses.

With Nick Corey, there's none of that customary (often seemingly compulsory) novelistic divide between the outward self and the inner essence, between performance and interiority. We read his thoughts as the happen...it is a mystery to him how his plans germinate, how they come into being and bear fruit. His understanding develops in tandem with the unfolding of events he has set in motion, events he can ultimately only understand as providential, inspired by a holy wrath that acts through him. Even he can't understand how the hapless yokel and the duplicitous manipulator coexist in him—not alternately so, not in an uneasy balancing act, but simultaneously, which is the most confounding of all.

It suggests that who we are in public, the actions we undertake among the people we live and breathe with, can never be components of a 'role' we take on, consciously or otherwise, distinct from who we Are. This is difficult—for Nick Corey and for the reader—because the private and most fully authentic self, inaccessible to others but fully comprehensible in one's own mind, is one of our must cherished conventions, one seemingly indispensable for both novels and individuals. This maneuver (which must have been very difficult for Jim Thompson to pull off so well) is a central element of what makes this book so invigorating and acerbic, and it makes you never want to read another goddamn 'unreliable' narrator as long as you live.

Stray thoughts:

• Nick gets closest to attaining deeper understanding by trying to articulate himself and his actions to others. Yet his brief moment of lucidity promptly capsizes into delusion as he resorts to divine intervention as explanation. He cannot conceive of his actions without a dimension of fatedness and necessity.

• There's a moment that is written and structured like a modernist epiphany, but the revelation is hollow and induces despair. The world Nick inhabits does not have the conditions in which refined perception can lead to anything life-sustaining or enriching.