Never Die [Hardcover]

Barry Hannah (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1991

Classic Hannah, this novel is an outrageous, dark comedy featuring gays, money, the West, the South, and most of modern America, all in a corrupt 1910 frontier town. Larry McMurtry says, "Barry Hannah is the best fiction writer in the South since Flannery O'Connor".

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Hannah ( Ray ; Airships ) targets the western genre with this outrageous, savage yet stillborn farce set in 1910, in a town named Nitburg. Idle gunslinger Fernando Mure resolves to burn the town to the ground, partly because it's corrupt, partly because the Chinese have moved in. After Judge Kyle Nitburg, who sold his first wife into slavery to Indians, hires a dwarf to smash Mure's kneecaps with a baseball bat, Fernando plots revenge with the help of his tubercular, dying girlfriend, Stella. An apocalyptic shoot-out is a fitting climax to this raunchy tale, clever without being funny, that lays bare a Wild West full of violence, cruelty, racism, morphine, booze, clap and coolies. Hannah populates his frenetic mythical frontier with grotesques, including twin sheriffs, a horny reverend who flies a biplane, a hermit, a homosexual opium-loving doctor given to "visions of manly gunfire," a blind millionaire widow and assorted ornery killers.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

We are in the corrupt Western town of Nitburg at the turn of the century. The town and its people are in the last, desperate throws of a dying past and a murderous future. What "never dies" in Hannah's extravagant satire is a feeling for our ability to inflict endless, grotesque, and mindless havoc on ourselves, others, and the environs. The story concerns an evil judge who rules the town with an iron hand and a hero who is more pretty than brave. They collide amid the squalor of whores, dopers, a tubercular lover, a malevolent dwarf, and the coming of the automobile. The result is a ritualized bloodletting of farcical proportion: just about everybody dies or is maimed. While one is left breathless and awash in the cleansing fires that engulf the town, Hannah lingers with his dark theme that such renewal is illusional, and all that is lasting is our blind stubbornness to persist in all our questionable glory. A wonderful work; highly recommended.
- Joseph Levandoski, Free Lib. of Philadelphia
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 152 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin (T); First Edition edition (May 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395515602
• ISBN-13: 978-0395515600
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,896,600 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars Not Quite There, March 24, 2000

By 

Thomas Ærvold Bjerre - See all my reviews

This review is from: Never Die (Hardcover)

With masterpieces such as Airships and Ray under his belt, Barry Hannah's 1991 novel Never Die comes as somewhat of a disappointment. Hannah is no doubt one of the most fascinating writers writing in America today but his best work of the 1990s has to be found in short story collections like Bats Out of Hell and High Lonesome.

Never Die takes place in the decaying and dying Old West at the beginning of the 20th century, and it is thus a part of a developing trend in southern fiction which focuses on the American West. The novel is filled with bizarre and grotesque characters, but unfortunately the story gets lost in this post-modern puzzle of honor and revenge. However, Hannah can still shock and amaze through his language. It is not a bad novel, but knowing that Hannah can do (and has done) much better, it seems only halfway there.