Heed the Thunder

by Jim Thompson

Overview

In the rural town of Verdon, Nebraska, in the early days of the 20th century, you can't go ten feet without running into one of the Fargos. So, Grant Fargo argues to his grandfather Lincoln, it's perfectly all right that he's desperately in love with his first cousin, Bella-she's the only source of intelligent conversation for miles, and in a town like Verdon, it would be hard not to end up with a relative of one kind or another.

Before it all plays out, men will be murdered, jailed, tarred and feathered or worse, and while everyone in the Fargo clan would kill for the family deeds, God might just end up with them instead. In Heed the Thunder, one of Thompson's earlier works, Thompson's signature style collides with a sweeping picaresque of the American prairie, in a multigenerational saga that's one part Steinbeck, two parts Dostoyevsky, and all Jim Thompson.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316403771
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	08/05/2014
Series:	Mulholland Classic
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	287,141
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Jim Thompson was born in Anadarko, Oklahoma. He began writing fiction at a very young age, selling his first story to True Detective when he was only fourteen. Thompson eventually wrote twenty-nine novels, all but three of which were published as paperback originals.

Thompson also co-wrote two screenplays (for the Stanley Kubrick films The Killing and Paths of Glory). Several of his novels have been filmed by American and French directors, resulting in classic noir including The Killer Inside Me (1952), After Dark My Sweet (1955), and The Grifters (1963).

Editorial Reviews

Noir writer Thompson, who has been getting a lot of attention lately in paperback reissue and in movie versions of some of his downbeat studies of small, thwarted lives, began rather differently, as evidenced in this reprinting of his second novel, first published in 1946. While scarcely the `` lost classic'' its publisher claims, it is an interesting period piece, an odd mix of social realism and early Dallas. Set in a small Nebraska town around 1914, it tells of the interlocking lives of the mean-spirited, brawling Fargo clan, a charming young lawyer who becomes a crooked politico, an embittered English bank clerk dying slowly of syphilis, sundry vivacious kids, and the glamorous Bella, whose longing to get away to the big city ends in death. Winding up in a Grand Guignol finish, this is very much a young man's book, full of uninhibited energy, mixing scenes that work with ones that emphatically don't, and demonstrating flashes of insight alongside crude tomfoolery. And there are embarrassing bursts of mawkish ``fine writing,'' of cut-rate Thomas Wolfe. But there is also a real feel for small-town life, a clearheaded, populist view of American economic imperatives, and an endearing playfulness that does not survive in the somber later Thompson. (July)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly