Uh, this book sounds awesome. Whoever wants to read it with us in our just-formed “Papermag Timeless Murder Ballads Book Club” should definitely do so.

I’d love it if book clubs like that existed. I’ve been a member of exactly one in my life. It lasted until it came time for my pick and I chose Harry Crews’ Feast of Snakes.

Moreover, everything that’s needed to be said on the subject has already been said by Harry Crews. (And, if you’ve got the money, you should buy the book the essay comes in, Florida Frenzy. All his essays are that good.)

Someday I’ll figure out how to just make a playlist on YouTube, instead of organizing things like this. But until then:

Part one:

Part two:

Part three:

Part four:

Part five:

Part six:

Part seven:

Part eight:

Part nine:

Part ten:

Part eleven:

So it goes.

Long before any civilians had actually seen it, Michael Winterbottom’s film “The Killer Inside Me” — adapted from Jim Thompson’s legendary 1952 crime novel — became a blogosphere target as a purported example of Hollywood’s pornographic glorification of violence against women. After the movie’s Sundance premiere in January, a female audience member assailed Winterbottom and the festival during the post-screening Q&A: “I don’t understand how Sundance could book this movie. How dare you? How dare Sundance?”

There were reports at the time that co-star Jessica Alba, who plays a prostitute who is literally beaten to a pulp by Casey Affleck’s deputy-sheriff protagonist, had walked out of that Sundance screening in disgust. Alba later denied this, and on Tuesday night at the film’s New York premiere in the Tribeca Film Festival, she and other cast members (including Kate Hudson, whose character suffers a similar fate) mounted an articulate defense of Winterbottom and his movie.

“Believe it or not, when I read the script it was a little bit watered down from the novel,” Alba said during an onstage chat with blogger and critic Glenn Kenny. “I read the novel and found it incredibly powerful. I took it to Michael and said, ‘I want to shoot this.’”

What “this” means is a story about one of the most chilling antiheroes in fictional history. On some level, complaining that “The Killer Inside Me” is full of misogynistic violence is akin to reading “Moby-Dick” and objecting to all the stuff about whaling. Lou Ford (played brilliantly by Affleck) presents at first as a baby-faced, all-American small-town cop, who doesn’t even carry a gun because crime in Central City, Texas, is nearly nonexistent. But beneath his ultra-normal veneer Lou has the tastes and background of a depraved European aristocrat (indeed, I suspect Lou inspired Thomas Harris’ creation of Hannibal Lecter). He’s probably the only person in Central City who reads Freud and listens to Schubert — or whose sexual appetite goes quite so far into sadomasochism, and beyond.

The rest.

All the shit that’s getting people riled up, that’s what crime fiction is to me. It’s supposed to be scary, and very few things scare the hell out of me like The Killer Inside Me. The only other crime novel I can think of in the same league — even though it’s not generally considered such — is Harry Crews’ A Feast of Snakes. These aren’t supposed to be the police procedurals and wisecracking detective serials that dominate the crime shelves. I like those too, but this is something different. This is nightmare, hunker-down-in-your-soul, how-deep-can-you-dig, release-the-fucking-bats territory.

I doubt most of Jim Thompson’s catalog could get published by a mainstream press these days. But it’s the reason I still read the stuff, hoping against hope that something’ll come along that’s just as big and terrifying.

• Giving up on authenticity.
• “Sorry for painting the word twat on your garage door.”
• Noam Chomsky remembers Howard Zinn.
• “‘She stared right into the camera with that baleful glare,’ Crews said. ‘Break your back with that stare.’”
• Camille Rose Garcia and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
• “I shot him in the nuts with bird-shot because he was beating my daughter.”
• Fuck the Olympics. (I have no idea what it is. I just Googled “Fuck the Olympics” and it was the first thing that came up.)

There’s a lot of good stuff, my favorite being audio recorded by a student on the first day of a Creative Writing class taught by Crews, starting at around 5:00.

Contrary to popular belief, I’m not a violent person. But if you wrong me, I’ll kill your fucking ass, and I’ll spend the rest of my life in jail. I’ll kill your fucking ass and you can count on it; depend on it.