OK, I finished Jim Thompson's Child of Rage, and whoo-boy. If I really had saved it to be the last book I ever read, I think I would have gone out on top, but it is a severely fucked up book. SEVERELY. I thought I would post my Goodreads review of it tonight, so here we go:
I try not to curse in these reviews, so I'm going to self-censor a little. This is the most f*cked up thing Jim Thompson ever wrote, and he wrote a lot of f*cked up things.
I don't even know where to begin with this. Allen Smith, the protagonist of this horror show, is one of the most despicable characters in literature. And the shocker of it is that it's not entirely his fault, but you don't know that until the end, and the way we learn this is a bit of a spoiler, so I won't mention it here.
Allen is a young man (just turned 18) who is forced to go to a school he can't stand to be in. He's an African American born to a white woman, and in the world of the 'Seventies, that earns him some privileges but for the most part he's treated like garbage because of the color of his skin. He takes the worst offense from white people who think they're progressive but are actually kinda-sorta racist in their own thinking without even knowing it. I get that. There is even a character who says that some of his best friends are Black. A definite red flag.
But he doesn't just have a chip on his shoulder. It's a boulder, and he takes his rage out on everyone within his path. And in an odd way, in the end they kind of all deserve it. The only damage he causes that was a complete accident is when he kills a baby and feels bad about it later.
He's sex-obsessed and even finds himself in situations where he could have sex with a willing partner, but it turns out that he's impotent unless he's thinking about his mom. And his desire to have sex with his mom isn't entirely his fault. She sometimes invites him into her bed but doesn't let him enjoy it. Not nearly as much as she enjoys it, at any rate.
And that's not the only incest in this book. He discovers that a brother and sister at school have a decidedly un-sibling-like relationship and sets things in motion that you will simply not believe unless you read this book. I expect the lowest of the low from the human race, and even this shocked me. And this isn't Allen's only manipulation. Not by a long shot.
This book is full of racism, sexism, homophobia, incest and a whole bunch of other stuff that would turn most people off. I'm not surprised to see these labels applied to Thompson himself, as he kind of ham-fistedly deals with these issues. I don't think he's a believer in any of those things, though. I think his point, in setting out to write this one, is to point out how horrible people are, and how violence begets violence and hatred begets hatred. I guarantee one thing though: as much as people like to make his books into movies, there isn't a single soul on this planet who would want to turn this one into a film. It is a truly f*cked up book.
There was also a novella in the back of the book, and I wondered why they included it at first. Around the halfway mark I realized that he'd probably written it as a practice run and then wound up cannibalizing it for Child of Rage. It's pretty interesting and f*cked up in its own right. I also found out that this book is actually signed. Not by Thompson, of course. This edition was published more than 30 years after he died. But it was signed by the illustrator, who I'd never heard of before, and Ed Gorman, the guy who wrote the intro. Gorman was a great writer, too, and it kind of surprised me that this was signed. I've owned this book for many years and never knew that. The reason is, the signed plate is usually at the front of the book. In this case it was at the very back of the book. Weird. But a pleasant surprise, nonetheless.
I can't recommend this book to anyone. I enjoyed it, but I have a very f*cked up mind, myself. If you're f*cked up, you might enjoy this book, too.
Oh yeah, one more thing. This is the second book of Thompson's in which he refers to himself. The first time was in The Alcoholics, when he writes about an alcoholic writer named Thompson admitted to an asylum for The Cure. In this one he refers to an alcoholic writer named Tomlinson or Thomas or something like that. It should be mentioned that Thompson literally died of alcoholism. So no matter what you say about him, you can never say that he didn't have a sense of humor about his own situation. I say that as a recovering alcoholic myself.
