It is my firm belief that there is an understandable reason for every action, however unsavoury. Judgement, therefore, should be withheld not simply ‘lest ye be judged’, but also because it is impossible to judge accurately without a full knowledge of that which is to be judged.

It is this state of affairs that often explains the success of the antihero in art, and in particular enables sympathy to be invoked for a violent protagonist. Once a novel or a film has laid out a life, that life is understandable; the chain of events from cause to effect can be discerned and, even if the actions are still not condoned, the actor is considered in a different light.

The Killer Inside Me, however, does not reveal the driver for its hero’s action until very late in the story, and, as the violence he perpetrates features from the very beginning, I find myself asking, why did I warm to him? What did I find attractive about a misogynistic, sadistic, scheming narcissist that I found myself desiring not only his salvation but his triumph?

I do tend to sympathise with whoever is telling me the story, or whoever is its focal point. I allow myself to see the story from their point of view, which is also the only way to be surprised by events unfolding. In constantly attempting to deduce the ‘truth’ about a situation, one deprives oneself of the joy of the story: one acts as an adult.

But what Thompson has done is to present a murderous schizophrenic in such a way that he does not appear in any way crazed or irrational. Lou Ford is apparently a calm, rational man, aware of himself and his situation. He is intelligent and personable, and it is in no way surprising that he is a successful and well liked deputy sheriff. It is almost possible, at times, to lay his violent actions to one side – and I read the book in a day.

Ford is the perfect anti-hero not because his root motivations are laid out, but because they are not. His delusion and lack of self awareness are such that everything he does seems perfectly rational, both to himself and, therefore, to the reader who suspends their disbelief. Once the root cause of Lou’s disposition is known, one is able to sympathise as one would with many other antiheroes, but before that point one does so on another level. We are all prisoners of ourselves, of our own inescapable place in the world, from which point everything makes sense – because it is what we do, it must. Nothing could be more rational than the action one chose to take.

The Killer Inside Me was brought to my attention because it has recently been made into a film by director Michael Winterbottom (24 Hour Party People) and writer John Curran, but what recommended it to me was Stanley Kubrick’s opinion that it is “probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered”. What chilled me the most was how that mind could be described as both balanced and unbalanced. Ford is warped, yes, but, more importantly, he is human – and there but for the grace of circumstance go I.