WILENE SHAW'S ONE FOOT IN HELL

One Foot In Hell reads like a classic fifties psycho-sexual noir that also looks as the dark society of small town America. You wouldn't be surprised if author Wilen Shaw read most of Jim Thompson's output up to that time before banging this out on the Remington. He practically strips his tale down to its genre bones, making it both sleek and engaging with little pretension.

Larry Crenshaw lives the American middle class dream in Hadsville, Kentucky as successful accountant, married to the girl he grew up with, Elaine, with a lovely daughter. However he battles sexual urges that bubble under his respected facade. His marriage is basically sexless, due to the drunken night night he raped Elaine after her refusals after marriage. Many of these demons, that Larry mainly keeps at bay with liquor, are linked to the moment his mother pulled him away from a moment of passion with his true love, Lola.

Things go completely wrong when his infatuation with the babysitter, Tawny, gets out of hand and leads to murder. He soon learns he has not covered his tracks as well as he thought. Soon the local law, Elaine, and a private detective hunting a killer with a similar M.O. is onto him. Then Lola comes back to town.

Shaw hits that sweet spot of putting the reader in the space of such a loathsome character, that you feel the tension as the noose tightens around him. Part of this is down by painting his community, a collection of appearance above everything hypocrites, as the enemy. It's best expressed buy Sam, Tawny's father, who talks about his own sex obsessions. You know when things start pointing to Larry, a lynch mob will form. Also, Shaw's nimble pacing keep s the story moving to where we have little time for moral meditation.

One Foot In Hell has little interest in morality. It's focus is on the unapologetic lurid entertainment of a man failing to keep his demons at bay in a amoral world. Wilene Shaw may mot be Jim Thompson, but he gets his playbook.