An early first-person account of a serial-killer schizophrenic hiding inside an “aw shucks” small-town Texas sheriff’s deputy, billed as a classic of roman noir, is marred only I think by the same thing that makes it groundbreaking: the time in which it was written. This novel, with its lurid depictions of sexual violence, and its attempt to understand a very modern disease from the inside out, is very much ahead of its time. But because only so much can be said outright, and the rest has to be hinted at, I was often a little confused as to what exactly was going on. Still, there were scenes that I even found shocking, half a century later.