So, just popped back in to write up a book I read in December that I completely forgot to write up. Savage Night by Jim Thompson. I love old school pulp mysteries: chandler, hammett, etc. but this was the first Jim Thompson book I have ever read. I'd like to read another because this one was just so messed up - and Thompson wrote such books as The Grifters, After Dark, My Sweet, among others. It begins when a short, damaged, youthful looking man (with tb incidentally) shows up in a small town and takes a room in a boarding house run by an excon and his wife, puportedly to start school at the local university. The landlord excon is rumored to have taken a deal to spill on his old gang and this young man was sent by "The Man" to kill him. So - a lot happens, steamy and perverse love triangle, betrayals, suspicions, moles, but the conclusion is so completely surreal, dark and excessive. There is a lot you can talk about in terms of symbolism, etc but mostly the end leaves you with this thought: that book was really fucked up.
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