The Killer Inside Me

⚖The case for it

Concede the surrounding cast: everyone orbiting Lou is a sketch, and the backstory offered to explain him arrives thin, a rushed writer's shortcut to motive. But flatness is deliberate here. Locked inside deputy Lou Ford's mind, a reader registers other people precisely as he does, obstacles to move or dispose of, and Thompson refuses to break frame and flinch on your behalf. Two turning points land with a force no warning readies you for. Somewhere in the folksy chatter, a grin creeps across your own face, and that grin is where the real menace lives.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

The scene where Lou beats Amy Stanton to death, and the one where he leaves Joyce Lakeland for dead, are written with a lingering care the book reserves for nothing else; filmed faithfully in 2010, they drove audiences out of theaters, and the page is no gentler. Thompson wrote fast for the paperback racks, and outside Lou's skull the characters are cardboard. The psychology is dime-store Freud, a childhood trauma issued like a license. The voice is the whole show. It is some show.

— the honest librarian