“American fiction begins with Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798), a sort of early-American Pop. 1280. Theodore Wieland hears a voice—he is convinced it is the voice of God—commanding him to ‘render’ his family ‘in proof of thy faith.’ He kills his wife and children, and then advances on his sister Clara. ‘This minister is evil, but he from whom his commission was received is God. Submit then with all thy wonted resignation to a decree that cannot be reversed or resisted. . . .’ Did the voice come from Carwin, the diabolical ‘biloquist’ (ventriloquist), or did it arise from Wieland’s own troubled imagination? The same questions of madness or calculation, God or the Devil [that arise in Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280] agitate Wieland.”

—Robbert Polito, Savage Art, A Biography of Jim Thompson, 1995.