The Erection Set is clearly marked by the distinguishing features of other Spillane fiction in characterization, plot, and themes, but it also departs sufficiently from the usual Spillane territory to suggest other related works of fiction. Certainly, the expose novel of small town life such as Metalious' Peyton Place, Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919), or Sinclair Lewis's Main Street (1920), come immediately to mind. Linton serves as a metaphor for the omnipresence of corruption in modern American life and serves to suggest that evil is not confined to the city and may lurk below the surface of even the most placid of settings.

A good deal of twentieth-century American writing has been devoted to debunking the moral virtues of small town living which was traditionally contrasted to more corrupt urban life, a literary convention which first appeared at the beginnings of the nineteenth century in the fiction of...