Stanley Kubrick described it as “probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered.”
That is the same Kubrick who directed a film based on A Clockwork Orange. So, what book is more “chilling and believable” than that Burgess’ novel?
Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me. First published in 1952 and now included in the Library of America’s Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s.
Lou Ford is the sort of person you really don’t want to know. You don’t want to know him because he is a guy who primarily talks in tired clichés; he is a boring guy, a very, very boring guy. Not too bright, affable, but really, really boring and dull. We learn this in chapter 1—two pages long, and by the end of it, the reader is gripped with a terror of spending 160 pages reading cliché after cliché after cliché.
Then 5 pages later, after he has savagely beaten and had relations with the new prostitute in town, we no longer want to spend time with Lou Ford because he is, well, a rather nasty bit of work.
The whole book is like that. Lou Ford interacting with society in public is really boring. Lou Ford behind closed doors is a vicious mean guy, and as the title notes, a killer.
So who is Lou Ford? Which one is he—the affable dullard or the cold-blooded killer? The closing line of the novel reveals his true identity: “All of us.”
OK, you are not as boring as Lou Ford on the surface. You are also (I certainly hope) not a murderer behind closed doors.
But, be honest: how much is the person everyone sees like the person inside your head? How many things have you done or thought in your life which you would not want exposed to the light of day?
Which one is the real person? Is Lou Ford a boring dullard who sometimes acts like a calculating beast or is he a vile murderer who sometimes acts like a nice guy?
Interestingly, that isn’t really a hard question. You don’t even have to read the novel to know the answer. The real Lou Ford is the killer. We all know this. The external Lou Ford is an act. Why do we know this? Remember Lou Ford is you and you know this of yourself.
Eliot describes this phenomenon:
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
The invaluable Annotated text of The Poems of T. S. Eliot has two interesting notes:
1. Eliot’s brother’s description: “he spoke of always having to be keyed up, alert to the importance of appearances, always wearing a mask among people…like a man playing a part.”
2. Eliot underlined the following passage from Kant: “For the truth is, that, however far we may carry our investigations into the world of sense, we never can come into contact with aught but appearances.”
Not only are you Lou Ford, everyone you meet is also Lou Ford. You only meet the mask, the face the other prepared to meet the face you prepared to meet it. You will never see the mind of another; you always see something else.
Some people are better at preparing the face to meet the other faces; some people’s exterior appearances may be closer to their inner sense; but in every case, every single case, you will only see he face presented to the world.
The Killer Inside Me is one of those books you just want to enjoy reading and then dismiss as a noir novel about a disturbed individual. But, it won’t let you do that. All of us.
Yeah, I reckon that’s all unless our kind gets another chance in the Next Place. Our kind. Us people.
All of us that started the game with a crooked cue, that wanted so much and got so little, that meant so good and did so bad. All us folks. Me and Joyce Lakeland, and Johnny Pappas and Bob Maples and big ol’ Elmer Conway and little ol’ Amy Stanton. All of us.
All of us.
You meant so good and did so bad. It’s easy to acknowledge that your inner life is not what you present to the world. It is easy to acknowledge that the same must be true of other people. It is easy to conclude that you only know the mask the other people put on to meet you.
But, here is that part that is not so easy to acknowledge. If all of this is true: do you also put on a face to meet yourself? Do you know your own self? Do you know the killer inside you? Are you sure?
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