{"id":4619,"date":"2012-08-24T06:00:55","date_gmt":"2012-08-24T11:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/?p=4619"},"modified":"2012-08-24T06:00:55","modified_gmt":"2012-08-24T11:00:55","slug":"getting-it-out-in-view","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/?p=4619","title":{"rendered":"Getting It Out In View"},"content":{"rendered":"
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What you see is not necessarily what you get. The well-dressed man’s brain is filled with realistic though bizarre characters who will get under your skin. Image borrowed from here.<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I recently finished a book by the crime writer Jim Thompson<\/a>. If his name is unfamiliar to you, you may have seen one of the films of one of his books: The Getaway,\u00a0<\/em>The Grifters<\/em> or The Killer Inside Me<\/em>. Or maybe you saw his scripts filmed by Stanley Kubrick: The Killing<\/em> or Paths of Glory<\/em>. Or maybe this is the first time you\u2019re hearing about him.<\/p>\n

His stories are peopled with characters who are so twisted<\/em>, so damaged<\/em> that one cannot turn away from the story. It\u2019s like each person he\u2019s writing is such a train wreck that to not look is impossible. Pop. 1280<\/em> is the most twisted thing I\u2019ve read since The Killer Inside Me<\/em>. In Killer<\/em>, you\u2019re as involved as the main character in every depraved act that\u2019s committed, complicit in the crimes. The same is true in 1280<\/em>, but he adds a layer of racism that\u2019s beyond uncomfortable and it\u2019s even uncomfortable in the mind of the narrator.<\/p>\n

Each book, written in first person, puts the reader deep inside\u00a0a main character’s\u00a0insidious brain squirming with creeping tendrils of evil and malice disguised as rational thought. It\u2019s unnerving, to say the least. I couldn\u2019t stop reading. I had<\/em> to know what was going to happen next.<\/p>\n

Dropping compelling characters into bizarre circumstances is certainly one way to keep me engaged in a story and Pop. 1280<\/em> is a master class in how to do it. Each chapter ends not just on a cliffhanger, but with the expectation that while that may be a nice place to stop you\u2019d better not. If you do \u2014 well, let\u2019s just say that no matter what you think might<\/em> happen next it won\u2019t hold a candle to what does happen. It\u2019s not the shock value that kept me reading, it was that the darker the places his characters went the more it made sense. He drew me deeply into those parts of my psyche that I don\u2019t often go.<\/p>\n

In comic books ending a scene at the bottom of a page is one way to ensure that the reader turns past the full-page ad for sneakers you can\u2019t afford in order to find out what happens next. With prose that\u2019s a lot harder. Unless the writer knows ahead of time what the format of the book will be and even then it\u2019s going to be a crapshoot, I think.<\/p>\n

No, in prose one must ensure reader engagement with deeply interesting characters in strange places, though those places may be familiar on the surface. Piling trouble after trouble after trouble on top of one\u2019s characters will keep them interesting. Ending each chapter with an as-yet unanswered question should finish the job.<\/p>\n

There aren\u2019t a lot of long paragraphs in his stories, either. Compared to my current read (The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters<\/em> by Gordon Dahlquist), Thompson\u2019s pulp noir<\/em> reads so quickly that it hardly seems any time has gone by when one thinks to look at the clock. The opposite, of course, is true. The dialogue is so conversational, so colloquial, and realistic that the only other writer whose style is even close is Elmore Leonard\u2019s (contemporary of Thompson) though he isn\u2019t nearly as bent.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a matter of getting what\u2019s in the writer\u2019s head out on the page. That\u2019s what will keep a reader engaged and hopefully get him lost in the story. I urge you to seek out Thompson\u2019s work but be prepared to squirm a lot while you read. You may see yourself somewhere in there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I recently finished a book by the crime writer Jim Thompson. If his name is unfamiliar to you, you may have seen one of the films of one of his books: The Getaway,\u00a0The Grifters or The Killer Inside Me. Or maybe you saw his scripts filmed by Stanley Kubrick: The Killing or Paths of Glory. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[174,193,571,1191],"class_list":["post-4619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mechanics","tag-characters","tag-cliffhanger","tag-jim-thompson","tag-turning-the-page"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4619"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4619\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}