Customer Reviews

A Feast of Snakes

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

After reading this book I have decided that Harry Crews is the best author whom i have had the pleasure of reading from. Before I read this book I had only read a piece of harry crews Autobiography. Immedietly after reading Feast of Snakes I went out and bought Mulching of America, another Crews novel. This book was extremely twisted and weird but very entertaining. Quite honestly i felt like I was breaking some kind of rule just reading this book while I was at school. As odd as it was you couldn't help but laugh out loud at the sick actions of the protaganist. I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys strange charachters doing strange things.

Of all Harry Crew's books, this remains my favorite. On the difficult tightwire that Crews has chosen to walk, this book strikes the perfect balance between the horror and the comedy of life in a universe that doesn't give a damn about the individual's hopes and dreams. At times both laugh out loud funny and saddly horrible, this tale of modern day marginal southern characters is the perfect example of the peculiar universe of Crew's fiction.

Harry Crews has established himself as a kind of southern gothic Hemingway whose bruised, bloody and always, in some ways, crippled protagonists seem more foolish than heroic. Yet these 'freaks' are human and their stories move us. There is a great humanity in Crews books, but always beneath the surface.

A Feast of Snakes is one of those books on the very short stack I keep on hand to reread with pleasure from time to time. If you enjoy black comedy - if the exremes of the human condition strike you as much comic as tragic - then this book might be for you. I love it.

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.

I first read a Feast of Snakes soon after it was available in the UK and to this day I have a vivid memory of it. It paints a distrubing picture of a futile existence in a small southern town. A nowhere person in a nowhere town going nowhere. Although I haven't read it for a number of years it has been on my mind as one to re-read and it is about to be republished in the UK and my order is already in. A book that must be recommeded to friends.

Maybe it's just a matter of taste, but novels by Harry Crews grab me in a way that few others do. "A Feast of Snakes" and "The Knockout Artist" are my two Crews favorites. Crews, of course, is best known for his portrayal of depravity, amorality and sin of all types, but there always seems to be (if one looks hard enough) a moral compass present throughout most of his books. The main character here, Joe Lon Mackey, is certainly no saint, and perhaps despicable in several ways, but he seems to sense the wrongness of the behavior of those around him, especially with reference to the annual rattlesnake round-up for which his otherwise dead-end town is known. Joe seems to want to change, he just does not know how to.

All the typical Crews elements are present in this novel, i.e. quirky and deviant characters, dark humor, and a shocking ending. Crews also makes a powerful statement in general about cruelty towards animals. Overall, a great read from an incredible author!

Think all Southerners are genteel, hospitable churchgoers? Think again.
Gone with the Wind this ain't. Crews exaggerates for effect, but speaking as a Southerner myself, I've met few people as vile as these characters. Animal cruelty, rape, suicide, murder, torture, insanity, battered women, drug abuse, kinky sex and illiteracy, not to mention a stream of body fluids...the filth never ends. The French have a phrase for such decadence: le goute de la boue, or "love of the dirt." It's apt here. Mystic, Georgia is a pigsty.
Crews makes Flannery O'Connor (whom he cites as an influence) look like Little Bo Peep.
Yet Crews does evoke sympathy for his protagonist, the cruel but hapless Joe Lon Mackey (no small feat). And he can be downright hilarious,e.g., when Joe Lon tells girlfriend Berenice: "Studying them goddamn foreign languages is done ruint you mind." Like a snake crushing its prey, Crews's muscular prose squeezes the reader tightly into a squalid world of pain, misery and depravity. Give Caesar his due: three stars.
A Feast of Snakes packs a wallop, and it's not for the faint of heart.
But one wallow in the mud is more than enough.

Combing components of Faulkner (southern despair and alcoholism) and Dante's Inferno (a demonic obsession with snakes), Crews has taken a common premise and raised it to the mythical. The premise, a twenty-something Joe Lon Mackey is stuck in a trailer home with a woman he loathes and several hungry children while he escapes with recent memories of his glory football days, drinking moonshine, and helping the town with its annual snake festival. Vipers are a prominent image in this novel, which is, among other things, a refutation of unchecked masculinity. The men in this novel thrive on violence and primal expressions of masculinity to fill their void. It is this need to fill the void with a demonic energy that informs the novel's viper metaphor.

The plot is easy to follow enough. We watch Joe Lon Mackey and others go down a descent of debauchery as they seethe with rage and resentment, partly because they sense there is a better life out there and partly because they have no real vision of what that better life could be.

With a parallel to The Great Gatsby, we see Joe Lon Mackey long for his high school sweetheart, Berenice, a stuckup cipher who thinks she's superior to all the locals after she leaves to town to go to an elitist college in the north east. Her world becomes the chimera in the way that Daisey's became a chimera or a mirage to Gatsby.

For all its nihilitic despair and Dantean violence, there is enough humor in this novel to keep it bouyant. It is also a short, terse 175 pages, crammed with themes about the chimera, the lost American Dream, male violence, tribalistic bonding rituals, racism, and the need for some kind of "religion," even a venomous one, in order to fill the abyss.

If you like Southern Gothic, you will love this book, which is successfully horrifying, funny, energizing, and moving, not to mention brilliantly written. It's about violent drunk losers whose best days were in high school. It's a bit slim, and it was written in the 1970s, which I didn't realize till I was about 2/3 through. Also, if you're reading this to read about New Orleans because of the flood (and because "The Knockout Artist," which is also awesome, takes place there), you should know this book actually takes place in Texas. I picked it up for the N.O. connection but was not disappointed. Great book by a great writer.

You will never encounter another literary character on the scale of Joe Lon Mackey. He is sick, depraved, perverted, cruel, and highly entertaining. He probably also exists in many forms in Modern America more than we would like to think about. This novel has exactly zero literary merit, but nonetheless deserves its five stars for the sheer lecherousness of it. You can read it in a few hours and be none the worse for wear because of it.