[.ca] A Feast of Snakes: A Novel (ISBN 0684842483)

From Amazon.com:
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

hell yeah......:
great crews book, one of his best...bizzare, funny, twisted, perverted...not for everyone but a great quick read..lets you take a peek into a part of america that you would want to run from screaming if you got anywhere near it...crews lets you jump into this world and swim around with the whiskey, snakes, blood and freaks....check it out you wont be disappointed

Tell it Man!:
Harry Crews rules! Weeeeeeee doggie what a tale!

Rednecks, Snakes and Corrupt Law Men -Yoweee:
I had never heard of Harry Crews until I did a search on bodybuilding books and came up with the fiction book Body authored by Mr. Crews. From there it has been a rocky raucous road! A Feast of Snakes was adventure from the get go. Snake roundups in Mystic, GA., one legged sheriff raping the women, bodybuilders, former high school athletes living off their past, shine....way too much to talk about here - you have to read the book!...set the mood before you start - sit on your porch with a mason jar full of spirits and take off on a non stop whirlwind adventure.

Great Work of Fiction:
I was assigned this awesome book in my Georgia History Class and let me tell you it is out of this world!!!! The only thing holding it back was the fact that Crews stretches it out and makes the story develop slow. Usually I shun any author that overstretches his book, but Crews does it with finesse. Crews builds up such suspense that makes the overstretching worthwhile. The book is a wonderful read though. You must keep an open mind because of the language and the sexual themes that Crews employs. Once you get over those, it's not hard to see what a great writer of fiction Crews is among other contemporaries.

Brutal, depraved, perfect...:
What if the Jerry Springer show was an allegory for the human condition? The masterpiece by Crews explores loneliness, isolation, destiny, and evil through the most unlikely of people. The symbolism of the snakes is milked for everything its worth and is somehow, pulled off perfectly. And that which holds this book together and sets it apart is, of course, the humor.