When I was fifteen, I picked up a copy of Jim Thompson’s Recoil, quite by accident, and his voice immediately caught me in its thrall. Like much of Thompson’s work, The Grifters is psychodrama thinly disguised as a pulpy, fast-paced crime thriller. It’s the story of a son and mother who, despite her best efforts, eats her young. It is a devastating, perverse and captivating love story of broken, desperate people cursed to manufacture their own doom.
The Grifters
p.j. taegel 