I do not care to spoil the pleasures of this novel for any readers, but will say that, this being Jim Thompson, the darkness begins to quickly gather, darkness that seeps from active wrongdoing and a citizenry’s cowed acceptance of wrongdoing, and no writer has ever been more cunning and potent in his depiction of the commonplace nature of evil. Thompson, when unleashed and at his best, could spook the souls of many of our anointed literary heroes deep underground while running their hides up a tree, and in Pop. 1280 he is unleashed and tearing it up righteously.

—Daniel Woodrell

1

Well, sir, I should have been sitting pretty, just about as pretty as a man Could sit. Here I was, the high sheriff of Potts County, and I was drawing almost two thousand dollars a year—not to mention what I could pick up on the side. On top of that, I had free living quarters on the second floor of the courthouse, just as nice a place as a man could ask for; and it even had a bathroom so that I didn’t have to bathe in a washtub or tramp outside to a privy, like most folks in town did. I guess you could say that Kingdom Come was really here as far as I was concerned. I had it made, and it looked like I could go on having it made—being high sheriff of Potts County—as long as I minded my own business and didn’t arrest no one unless I just couldn’t get out of it and they didn’t amount to nothin’.

And yet I was worried. I had so many troubles that I was worried plumb sick.

I’d sit down to a meal of maybe half a dozen pork chops and a few fried eggs and a pan of hot biscuits with grits and gravy,and I couldn’t eat it. Not all of it. I’d start worrying about those problems of mine, and the next thing you knew I was getting up from the table with food still left on my plate.

It was the same way with sleeping. You might say I didn’t really get no sleep at all. I’d climb in bed, thinking this was one night I was bound to sleep, but I wouldn’t. It’d be maybe twenty or thirty minutes before I could doze off. And then, no more than eight or nine hours later, I’d wake up. Wide awake. And I couldn’t go back to sleep, frazzled and wore out as I was.

Well, sir, I was layin’ awake like that one night, tossing and turning and going plumb out of my mind, until finally I couldn’t stand it no longer. So I says to myself, “Nick,” I says, “Nick Corey, these problems of yours are driving you plumb out of your mind, so you better think of something fast. You better come to a decision, Nick Corey, or you’re gonna wish you had.”

So I thought and I thought, and then I thought some more. And finally I came to a decision.