A Feast of Snakes: A Novel [Paperback]

Harry Crews (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 15, 1987

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".

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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 --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Atheneum (May 15, 1987)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0689707150
• ISBN-13: 978-0689707155
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.3 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (40 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,031,860 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How I Became an Addict, January 17, 2000

By 

Eleventhour "eleventhour" (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Feast of Snakes: A Novel (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.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars feast of snakes, December 27, 1999

By 

nathan wood (FORT MILL, SOUTH CAROLINA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Feast of Snakes: A Novel (Paperback)

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.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderfully grotesque black comedy, December 6, 1999

By 

Doug Vaughn - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: A Feast of Snakes: A Novel (Paperback)

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.