Customer Reviews

The Gospel Singer

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When it comes to sex-God-and-violence books, Harry Crews is one of the best contemporary southern gothic novelists that's still pumping out good books.

And after all, this is his first novel. No pretension, no inarticulate naivete, just a gradually and very-well developed plot that reminded me at times of book four of Vergil's Aeneid.

Perhaps the most intriguing element of the book was the complete lack of introduction; Crews assumes from the origin that you'll have a good idea what he's talking about (and enjoy it more) if he simply begins not with alot of character-developing tedium but rather launches into a self-explanatory dialogue that makes everything all the more real, dialectical spellings and all. Although Crews seems to "carve 'suk for honesty' on [his] chest," the entire atmosphere of the seting, Enigma, Georgia, is exaggerated to a squalid surreality of a seemingly ordinary impoverished deep-South town. Crews' sparse yet vibrant depictions of southern life ensure decades prior that, well, he's not gonna stop writing anytime soon.

A wonderful read....
I could see the charaters in this novel..and smell the sells, be they ever so foul..
A better southern writer..??..Not in my generation...
He is the master of southern dirt roots..
He has lived it, breathed it, and lived totell the tales..
That, in itself, is a miracle..
Loved it and all of the rest of his works..