The novel begins: "I shook the rain from my hat and walked into the room. Nobody said a word. They stepped back politely and I could feel their eyes on me." In this, the film begins with a shot of sordid Reagan-era NYC before panning past a fish tank from which Mike Hammer is retrieving a fallen fish. A perfect marriage of Spillane cruelty and Larry Cohen subversive humanism.

Larry Cohen is a sick man. Sick and great.

If someone gave me a book I would fuck them, too.

As Phoebe says in the iconic episode of Friends, “Family gets dog, frontier fun.”