From the acclaimed author of such novels as "Blood and Grits" and "Childhood" comes a wildly weird and breathtakingly original visit to the rural South that reveals the exotic subculture that erupts in all its glory at the Rattlesnake Roundup in Mystic, Georgia. "No number of adjectives in the thesaurus can do full justice to the dazzlingly bizarre nature of Crews' creations"-- "Washington Post Book World"
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Welcome to Mystic, Georgia. This going-nowhere town hosts the annual Rattlesnake Roundup, which attracts thousands of visitors for a rough 'n' rowdy weekend of your basic primate behavior--hard drinking, ogling bikini-clad contestants in the Miss Mystic Rattle beauty contest, betting on dog fights, snake catching, and snake eating. Meet Joe Lon Mackey. He lives in a trailer in Mystic with his lumpy, devoted wife and two hollerin' young'uns. His days of glory as the Boss Snake of the Mystic Rattlers football team are over, and he didn't have the grades to go to college. He's just now realizing that his dreary business selling beer, bonded whiskey, and moonshine is all he's gonna get in the way of a destiny.
As the crowds for the Roundup start to overfill the camping area, Joe Lon feels on the inside like a barrel of snakes: "a writhing of the darkness, an incessant boiling of something thick and slow-moving." As he and his good ol' buddy get ready to wander around and check out the scene, Joe Lon says, "Just a bunch of crazy people cranking up to git crazier. But that's all right. Feel on the edge of doing something outstanding myself."
A Feast of Snakes is probably the most skillfully crafted and entertaining novel ever written in which a fed up person goes violently berserk. But Harry Crews belongs to the tradition of great Southern weird writers such as Flannery O'Connor, so A Feast of Snakes is richer than that: Crews serves up the reality of people's savage and unrelenting cruelty toward animals and toward each other, stark truths about human despair, male-female face-offs at their sexiest and most ruthless, and (here's his real genius) humor so powerful you can't help but laugh--even though it hurts when you do.
A Feast of Snakes, first published in 1976, is a dazzling and flawless horror novel. --Fiona Webster
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
24 of 24 people found the following review helpful
By Eleventhour
Format:Paperback
This was the first novel by Harry Crews that I ever read. It may as well have been heroin because to this day I will read anything and everything he publishes. Crews writes almost tenderly about brutal, ugly people in a wasteland of frustrated desires. He grabs you by the back of the neck and holds your head down close enough to see the gorgeous, swirling iridescence of a fly's wing as it feasts on rotted meat. He propels you through the most chilling land of horrors you will ever see and yet, somehow leaves you feeling uplifted. Crews will baptize you in a lake of raw sewage laughing gleefully all the while as you struggle to understand why you feel redeemed.
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Author Harry Crews is no longer among us. He passed away at 76 in Gainesville, FL, on March 28, 2012, having suffered from neuropathy for quite some time. This reader studied under him while in college during the '70s; as a fellow former Marine, he was not just a teacher, but was also a mentor and an acquaintance who became somewhat of a friend. He lived in Gainesville for over forty years, and said that he intended to keep writing "until the curtain comes down."
His 1976 masterpiece, A Feast of Snakes, was a good example of how first hand experiences in life can become the basis of a memorable yet sometimes disturbing novel. This tale concerns a town's obsessive annual ritual, a rural rattlesnake rodeo. Welcome to Mystic, Georgia, the home of one Joe Lon Mackey, a truly terrifying protagonist. Joe Lon spends his free time running the illegal alcohol business that he inherited from his father, a pit-bull breeder whose brutality to animals is esteemed by the locals.
His sister is a disturbed individual with some repulsive habits who watches television all day. His best friend is the local sheriff, a bitter man who lost his leg in Vietnam, one who locks up and rapes the young, black girls who reject his advances. Joe Lon castigates himself for abusing his wife, the woman who cares for his two youngest children. He wallows in a mixture of past grandeur and present disappointments with the knowledge that his high school football injuries had cost him any kind of real future.
Against this backdrop is the annual rattlesnake roundup, one that that brings alcohol-fueled crazies from all over the Bible Belt to this small rural Georgia town to pursue, slaughter, and eat just about any snakes they can find. Add to this mixture a bikini beauty contest and a pep rally on the night before the hunt, and you have the picture.
Joe Lon Mackey is about as inexcusable and reprehensible a character as one can find in contemporary literature. But it's the way that the author Crews put it all together into those words that made many feel that this book was his finest work, as it opens with this passage:
"She felt the snake between her breasts, felt him there, and loved him there, coiled, the deep tumescent S held rigid, ready to strike. She loved the way the snake looked sewn onto her V-neck letter sweater, his hard diamondback pattern shining in the sun. It was unseasonably hot, almost sixty degrees, for early November in Mystic, Georgia, and she could smell the light musk of her own sweat. She liked the sweat, liked the way it felt, slick as oil, in all the joints of her body, her bones, in the firm sliding muscles, tensed and locked now, ready to spring -- to strike -- when the band behind her fired up the school song: 'Fight On Deadly Rattlers of Old Mystic High.'"
Some have called this a tale of redemption, but I'll leave that up to the reader to explore. And the potential reader should be aware that this is a dark novel that is filled with viciousness, brutality, intolerant behavior, animal cruelty, murder, and other inexcusable behavior. It's not an easy read for some, but Harry Crews does have a way of using his words to waken us, to move us, and see how the crafting of words can make us more aware of those certain darknesses that are in our world, perhaps even as much today as they were when he penned the words.
Crews wrote 17 novels in his lifetime, along with numerous short stories, magazine articles and a memoir. He taught graduate and undergraduate fiction writing workshops at the University of Florida from 1968 until he finally retired in 1997. In the book Getting Naked with Harry Crews: Interviews, he explained to interviewer and editor Hank Nuwer that his military service was crucial. "If I hadn't gone in the Marine Corps, I wouldn't be a professor in the university. I'd be in the state prison because I was a bad actor and a bad boy."
I picked up my second copy of this work in NYC's Strand Bookstore in a bargain section awhile back, surprised to find it yet unwilling to just let it sit there, unforgotten. And is this my favorite of this author's works? In terms of literary greatness, I would put it up there with my true favorite of his works, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place.
An excerpt from a forthcoming memoir had been published in the Georgia Review, and there has been talk of rereleasing his books, many of them out of print, in digital editions. Personally I hope to see that. In an interview from the '90s, Harry Crews said about writing: "If you're gonna write, for God in heaven's sake, try to get naked. Try to write the truth. Try to get underneath all the sham, all the excuses, all the lies that you've been told."
In his lifetime he lived up to that, and did it many times over.
3/30/2012
His 1976 masterpiece, A Feast of Snakes, was a good example of how first hand experiences in life can become the basis of a memorable yet sometimes disturbing novel. This tale concerns a town's obsessive annual ritual, a rural rattlesnake rodeo. Welcome to Mystic, Georgia, the home of one Joe Lon Mackey, a truly terrifying protagonist. Joe Lon spends his free time running the illegal alcohol business that he inherited from his father, a pit-bull breeder whose brutality to animals is esteemed by the locals.
His sister is a disturbed individual with some repulsive habits who watches television all day. His best friend is the local sheriff, a bitter man who lost his leg in Vietnam, one who locks up and rapes the young, black girls who reject his advances. Joe Lon castigates himself for abusing his wife, the woman who cares for his two youngest children. He wallows in a mixture of past grandeur and present disappointments with the knowledge that his high school football injuries had cost him any kind of real future.
Against this backdrop is the annual rattlesnake roundup, one that that brings alcohol-fueled crazies from all over the Bible Belt to this small rural Georgia town to pursue, slaughter, and eat just about any snakes they can find. Add to this mixture a bikini beauty contest and a pep rally on the night before the hunt, and you have the picture.
Joe Lon Mackey is about as inexcusable and reprehensible a character as one can find in contemporary literature. But it's the way that the author Crews put it all together into those words that made many feel that this book was his finest work, as it opens with this passage:
"She felt the snake between her breasts, felt him there, and loved him there, coiled, the deep tumescent S held rigid, ready to strike. She loved the way the snake looked sewn onto her V-neck letter sweater, his hard diamondback pattern shining in the sun. It was unseasonably hot, almost sixty degrees, for early November in Mystic, Georgia, and she could smell the light musk of her own sweat. She liked the sweat, liked the way it felt, slick as oil, in all the joints of her body, her bones, in the firm sliding muscles, tensed and locked now, ready to spring -- to strike -- when the band behind her fired up the school song: 'Fight On Deadly Rattlers of Old Mystic High.'"
Some have called this a tale of redemption, but I'll leave that up to the reader to explore. And the potential reader should be aware that this is a dark novel that is filled with viciousness, brutality, intolerant behavior, animal cruelty, murder, and other inexcusable behavior. It's not an easy read for some, but Harry Crews does have a way of using his words to waken us, to move us, and see how the crafting of words can make us more aware of those certain darknesses that are in our world, perhaps even as much today as they were when he penned the words.
Crews wrote 17 novels in his lifetime, along with numerous short stories, magazine articles and a memoir. He taught graduate and undergraduate fiction writing workshops at the University of Florida from 1968 until he finally retired in 1997. In the book Getting Naked with Harry Crews: Interviews, he explained to interviewer and editor Hank Nuwer that his military service was crucial. "If I hadn't gone in the Marine Corps, I wouldn't be a professor in the university. I'd be in the state prison because I was a bad actor and a bad boy."
I picked up my second copy of this work in NYC's Strand Bookstore in a bargain section awhile back, surprised to find it yet unwilling to just let it sit there, unforgotten. And is this my favorite of this author's works? In terms of literary greatness, I would put it up there with my true favorite of his works, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place.
An excerpt from a forthcoming memoir had been published in the Georgia Review, and there has been talk of rereleasing his books, many of them out of print, in digital editions. Personally I hope to see that. In an interview from the '90s, Harry Crews said about writing: "If you're gonna write, for God in heaven's sake, try to get naked. Try to write the truth. Try to get underneath all the sham, all the excuses, all the lies that you've been told."
In his lifetime he lived up to that, and did it many times over.
3/30/2012
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful
By Rob
Format:Paperback
I grew up drinking Busch ponies in trailer parks around Western KY. I know these people. Joe Lon is what happens when the American myth is exposed and the real world hits you in the face. Football hero today, loser tomorrow.
Harry Crews doesn't mess with redemption in this novel, the characters are lost with one exception. This is accurate at the bottom. Very few people "move up." Read this and learn what life is like at the bottom.
Harry Crews doesn't mess with redemption in this novel, the characters are lost with one exception. This is accurate at the bottom. Very few people "move up." Read this and learn what life is like at the bottom.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Feast Indeed
A Feast Of Snakes is a stunning novel.
It's set in Mystic, Georgia during the build up to a Rattlesnake Roundup that's become a little too successful for the small town... Read more
It's set in Mystic, Georgia during the build up to a Rattlesnake Roundup that's become a little too successful for the small town... Read more
Published 1 day ago by nigel p bird
1.0 out of 5 stars
A Feast of Snakes
I was very disappointed in this work. It provides the reader with a vile, twisted view of life in a small southern town peopled by repulsive characters with no redeeming values. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Karen H. Burnsed
4.0 out of 5 stars
Very Strong Southern Gothic
This is Southern Gothic at its most extreme. I grew up in Georgia, and have known a few people like those portrayed in the book, but I've also made efforts to avoid these type of... Read more
Published 7 months ago by G. S. Thompson
4.0 out of 5 stars
Gives permission to write.
Larry Brown, the deceased novelist said it best. After he read Feast of Snakes, he asked himself, "Are people allowed to write this stuff? Read more
Published 8 months ago by Brian McNally
3.0 out of 5 stars
Dog lovers beware...
Harry Crews is a great writer and his story and characters are compelling, but let this review serve as a warning to animal lovers. Read more
Published 9 months ago by Priscilla
5.0 out of 5 stars
No one writes like Harry Crews
Harry Crews's portrayal of southern redneck culture is nothing less than brilliant in this sordid and fun little tale about the people and events surrounding the "celebration" of... Read more
Published 12 months ago by A big fan
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the best reading experiences of my life!
This is one of the more interesting and definitely one of the best books I've read in the past decade. Read more
Published 12 months ago by Ada Ardor
5.0 out of 5 stars
Joe Lon Mackey: Southern Gothic Icon
Henry David Thoreau said that all life will fable, and every experience become a myth. Faulkner set the bar very high in the Deep South flavor of Southern Gothic mythmaking, but... Read more
Published 18 months ago by Joel Parker
1.0 out of 5 stars
Sssssome Ideassss Ssssssuc*
Perhaps in 1976 the shock factor appealed to a larger market and that accounts for this book still being available for purchase. Read more
Published 21 months ago by Decatur Reader
5.0 out of 5 stars
Unputdownable
This is a horror story: no doubt about it. Crews spares no graphich detail in opening up an 'underworld' of characters and social interactions, leaving us, the readers, reluctant... Read more
Published 21 months ago by ivona poyntz
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 7
books:
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24
books
cite this book:
See all 24 books citing this book
- A Childhood: The Biography of a Place by Harry E. Crews in Front Matter
- Little Brother by Willard on page 128
- Florida Frenzy by Harry E. Crews in Front Matter
- The Gospel Singer: A Novel by Harry Crews in Front Matter
- Blood and Grits by Harry Crews in Front Matter
See all 7 books this book cites
- Perspectives on Harry Crews by Erik Bledsoe on 39 pages
- Writing In The Southern Tradition.Interviews with Five Contemporary Authors. (Costerus NS 78) (Costerus New Series) by Ashby Bland Crowder on page 81, page 92, and page 102
- Georgia Odyssey by James C. Cobb on page 96, and Back Matter
- Cultural Studies 11.2 by Lawrence Grossberg on page 150, and page 151
- Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People by John Hartigan in Back Matter
See all 24 books citing this book
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