As in many of Jim Thompson's novels, The Kill-Off focuses on lost and morally compromised people. The novel follows a woman who believes that her neighbors want to kill her and take her money. However, Thompson does not present his protagonist as an innocent victim. She is a gossip who constantly spreads rumors about the residents of her small town, and the reader soon realizes that some of her neighbors may indeed have reasons to dislike her. At the same time, the other townspeople are hardly portrayed as honest or admirable individuals. Thompson creates a world in which it is difficult to find anyone completely innocent, and where the line between victim and culprit becomes increasingly blurred.
Likewise, as in many of Thompson's other novels, The Kill-Off contains autobiographical elements and appears to be fueled by the author's resentment toward certain people around him. Thompson often worked through his personal frustrations and conflicts in his fiction. As Robert Polito points out in his biography Savage Art, and as Arnold Hano, Thompson's editor at Lion Books, once observed, Thompson had a tendency to work out his problems in his novels.
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