{"id":716,"date":"2013-08-08T16:46:25","date_gmt":"2013-08-09T00:46:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/?p=716"},"modified":"2013-08-08T16:46:25","modified_gmt":"2013-08-09T00:46:25","slug":"review-pop-1280","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/2013\/08\/08\/review-pop-1280\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Pop. 1280"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Pop.<\/a>
\n Pop. 1280<\/a> by Jim Thompson<\/a>
\n My rating: 4 of 5 stars<\/a><\/p>\n

This started off like parody of a western. Not that I\u2019ve read any westerns. Except for Robert Coover\u2019s [b:Ghost Town|156195|Ghost Town|Robert Coover|http:\/\/d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net\/books\/1348568393s\/156195.jpg|150728], selections by [a:Percival Everett|31723|Percival Everett|http:\/\/d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net\/authors\/1267321326p2\/31723.jpg], and Trevanian\u2019s [b:Incident at Twenty-Mile|30895|Incident at Twenty-Mile|Trevanian|http:\/\/d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net\/books\/1328033210s\/30895.jpg|31227]. Oh, and [b:Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West|394535|Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West|Cormac McCarthy|http:\/\/d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net\/books\/1335231647s\/394535.jpg|1065465] by Cormac McCarthy. Maybe it\u2019s this last one I should speak to the most when tryin\u2019 to wrap my noggin\u2019 around Pop. 1280<\/i>. Because as it got its rhythm, this novel stopped being just a silly parody, and something a little more subtle, a little more insidious.<\/p>\n

What is evil? I say, simply, it is seduction. And nothing more. Evil is not merely cruel, bloodthirsty, hateful, spiteful, or any of the thousand disgusting things we have shoved down our throats in movies and TV shows and books overfull of slick characters with shiny hairdos. Evil is having temptation thrown in front of you, and you doing with it what you know you should not do.<\/p>\n

Evil, then is automatically an intrinsic force. It\u2019s something already inside ourselves. When you read a book like Pop. 1280<\/i>, with its goofy language and crazy characters and zany situations, you can\u2019t help but giggle, and guffaw, and laugh out loud. And then you\u2019re nodding your head. Your cheering on the main character, everything he\u2019s doing. You want him\u2026 well, not to necessarily succeed, but to get on with it.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t get me wrong. This isn\u2019t a moralizing tail, proselytizing obfuscated, a parable to hang your hat on so\u2019s you can go out and do good works. It\u2019s just a novel about the Sheriff of Potts county, the women he\u2019s loved and the men he\u2019s hated. It\u2019s a novel about self-discovery. And it\u2019s evil. You\u2019re going to end up discovering a thing or two about yourself before you get through it all.<\/p>\n

View all my reviews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pop. 1280 by Jim Thompson My rating: 4 of 5 stars This started off like parody of a western. Not that I\u2019ve read any westerns. Except for Robert Coover\u2019s [b:Ghost Town|156195|Ghost Town|Robert Coover|http:\/\/d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net\/books\/1348568393s\/156195.jpg|150728], selections by [a:Percival Everett|31723|Percival Everett|http:\/\/d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net\/authors\/1267321326p2\/31723.jpg], and Trevanian\u2019s [b:Incident at Twenty-Mile|30895|Incident at Twenty-Mile|Trevanian|http:\/\/d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net\/books\/1328033210s\/30895.jpg|31227]. Oh, and [b:Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Review: Pop. 1280”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p24y52-by","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/716","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=716"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/716\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":717,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/716\/revisions\/717"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}