*"What are you going to say when you're drowning in your own dung and they keep booting you back into it, when all the screams in hell wouldn't be as loud as you want to scream, when you're at the bottom of the pit and the whole world's at the top, when it has but one face, a face without eyes and ears, yet it watches and listens..."

Jim Thompson's world was dark, dark, dark. Seldom in 20th century literature has a writer thrown up so many desperate visions of everyday men spiralling into a hell of their own making - bungling criminal amateurs, hotel clerks, wildcat oilmen, grifters, drifters and sinister sheriffs - all riddled with diseased obsessions and pinioned under the stiletto heels of venal, ruthless women.