Harry Crews, Feast of Snakes

First read this about two years ago, happened to run across it again and just finished it for a second time. (Insert standard disclaimer about me being a lit moron here.) I like this book quite a damn lot. I suppose Crews is in some kind of line of descent from Faulkner and O'Conner...some kind of Southern gothic grotesquery going on. There's a kind of vision here...of...hopelessness, isolation, ignorance and brutality. Or maybe: the hopelessness of isolation and ignorance...and, um, something about brutality, too.

Now, I grew up rural on the edge of the Missouri Ozarks, so I'm not what you'd call unfamiliar with these general themes. All of what's good about life in what I would be inclined to call the actual world--i.e. the world outside major cities--shades off into bad. Maybe too much isolation brings it on...I don't know. But Crews has an ear for a certain kind of rural/small town depravity--a different kind of depravity than Faulkner had in mind...something more visceral maybe, or just more brutal or raw. It's painful to turn your mental gaze onto the uniformly bleak and awful lives of Crews's characters in Feast of Snakes...but (not to sound too much like a pretentious book reviewer...) it's hard to look away once you do.