Savage Night
by Jim Thompson
published
November 5th 1991
(first published 1953)
by Vintage
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binding
Paperback, 160 pages
isbn
0679733108
(isbn13: 9780679733102)
description
Is Carl Bigelow a fresh-faced college kid looking for a room, or is he a poised hit man tracking down his victim? And if Carl is really two people, wh...more
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other reviews (showing 1-20 of 163)
He never wrote a cheery book, but this is Thompson at his bleakest and most savage, and featuring the strangest climax in all of noir, a sustained piece of virtuoso weirdness that runs counter to the grim realism that has come before and must surely have informed the writing of many a coat-tail dragging hepcat. Chuck Pahaluniuk, I am looking at you.
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Read in September, 1993
recommends it for:
ordinary crime novel fans
Pretty below-average work by Jim Thompson where a short, underdeveloped gangster hides out from the law at a college campus pretending to be a student. Big deal. Not much happens until the last ten pages, which are surreal and creepy, but by the time you reach it you won't care, because the book will have you comatose by then.
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Read in November, 2007
Wow. Strange, sick, oneiric, disturbing, and tense. After E.A. Poe, Jim Thompson is the master of unreliable first-person narrators. The ending of this novel is as formally inventive, existentially despairing, and as perfect as anything written in the English language.
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Read in September, 2005
Absolute classic of noir fiction. Thompson was at the top of his whiskey-soaked game here. A truly weird book, not at all what many people think of as "crime fiction." The last thirty pages or so are damn near surrealist.
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Read in August, 2008
So far, I can't put this book down. I started it yesterday and I am almost done with it!
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Read in April, 2006
update 9:05p 10/7: just re-read this badboy in one afternoon(+evening)
thoughts:
Physical deformities, mental infirmities, and vice versa
Haunting pasts, secrets, failures
Reluctantly deceiving one's way into the dead-end dimness of existence
...It's all here.
IT'S ALL HERE!
Currently Re-reading
10/7: I found a library with all of Jim Thompson's books (I own a few, but not this, my favorite) so I'm going to re-read this and then all of them!
thoughts:
Physical deformities, mental infirmities, and vice versa
Haunting pasts, secrets, failures
Reluctantly deceiving one's way into the dead-end dimness of existence
...It's all here.
IT'S ALL HERE!
Currently Re-reading
10/7: I found a library with all of Jim Thompson's books (I own a few, but not this, my favorite) so I'm going to re-read this and then all of them!
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Read in February, 2001
Best last two pages ever.
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