"AS TIMELESS AND AS IMPORTANT AS IT EVER WAS": FIRST SIGNED LIMITED EDITION OF THE FIRST HARDCOVER EDITION OF JIM THOMPSON'S CLASSIC NOVEL, KILLER INSIDE ME, ONE OF ONLY 26 LETTERED COPIES SIGNED BY STEPHEN KING

(KING, Stephen) THOMPSON, Jim. The Killer Inside Me. Los Angeles: Blood & Guts, 1989. Octavo, original gilt-stamped black cloth, original pictorial slipcase.

First signed limited edition of the first hardcover edition of Thompson's legendary novel, copy "L" of only 26 lettered copies signed by Stephen King (376 total), with King's introductory essay, this edition issued posthumously nearly four decades after the 1952 Lion Books paperback, a fine copy in the original slipcase.

"Jim Thompson brought a level of psychological realism to crime novels seldom achieved by writers in that or any other genre" (Magill IV:1590). In King's introduction to this limited edition of Killer Inside Me, signed by King, he writes that the novel is "as timeless and as important as it ever was… an American classic, no less, a novel which deserves space on the same shelf with Moby-Dick, Huckleberry Finn, Sun Also Rises and As I lay Dying… Before Kerouac, before Ginsberg… or Yossarian in Catch-22, this anonymous and little-read Oklahoma novelist captured the spirit of his age, and the spirit of the 20th century's latter half." The novel's narrator, Sheriff Lou Ford, is "armed and dangerous in a way no one else knows" (Murphy, Encyclopedia of Murder, 484). "Thompson's work is distinguished for its intellectual depth, its suspicion of gender norms, its bleak satirical vision, and its tendency toward experimental narrative… Killer Inside Me ruthlessly parodies pulp clichés, among them the heroic masculinity of the Western marshal" (Encyclopedia of 20th-Century Fiction, 868). Even in the world of crime fiction, "Thompson's work is especially disquieting" (Forter, Murdering Masculinities, 127). The basis for several film adaptations, including director Michael Winterbottom's 2010 film. Signed limited edition of 26 lettered copies, and 360 numbered copies. First issued as a paperback by Lion Books in 1952, this is "the first hardcover edition of Thompson's Killer Inside Me" (Arnold Hano, Afterword). Facsimile signatures of Thompson on free endpapers. Hubin II; Vol. I: 796. Magill IV: 1590-1595.

A fine copy.