Dorothy B. Hughes’ 1963 novel opens with Dr. Hugh Densmore driving his mother’s white Cadillac through the desert of southeastern California. Hugh, who is completing his residency at UCLA Medical Center, is on his way to his parents’ house in Phoenix to attend his sister’s wedding.

Driving through the night, he spies a lone figure stirring beneath a tree in the desert outside the town of Indio. He stops to check on the person, a girl of fifteen or so named Iris Croom. She tells him she’s trying to get to Phoenix. He gives her a ride to Blythe, near the Arizona border, buys her a bus ticket from there to Phoenix and bids her goodbye.

This is a brilliant book by a brilliant writer. Unlike so much contemporary genre fiction in which killers are portrayed as inhuman two-dimensional monsters, Hughes portrays Dix Steele as a human being gone horribly wrong. Though the story is told in third person, we see the world from the killer’s perspective. We occupy his unsteady mind as he becomes increasingly unhinged, and we see how his actions arise from feelings that most people experience as difficult and uncomfortable but that he experiences as intolerable, torturing, and unresolvable.