A Feast of Snakes: A Novel

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

Product Description
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".

"A Feast Of Snakes" is more than an angry book; it boils over with rage. Joe Lon Mackey isn't just a Southern redneck stereotype, he is the embodiment of the frustration and desperation of America's rural poor. "Deliverance" reads like a fairy tale in comparison to this novel.

The tone of "A Feast Of Snakes" is vile and hateful. It feels like Crews' most personal work, perhaps written at a time when Crews was going through a living hell of his own. Like Joe Lon Mackey, Crews comes from a poor, rural area of Georgia. Unlike Joe Lon, Crews' skills afforded him the opportunity to break away from the endless cycle of violence, ignorance, hatred and self destruction that is Joe Lon's life. But Crews hasn't forgotten. As detestable as Joe Lon is, it is obvious that Crews has a certain respect for - or at least feels a kinship with - the character.

You will likely feel unsettled after reading this novel. You may feel angry. You will certainly feel something and you will feel it intensely. This book grabs you by the throat and bangs your head against the wall for seemingly no reason. But maybe there is a reason. Maybe someone finally realized that in order to properly convey the impotent fury of the Joe Lon's of the world, the story must be written with cold, hard, unflinching honesty. Love it or hate it, you simply can't deny the truth that Crews has the guts to tell with a defiant pride.


A sick, depraved, and hilarious voyage through Americana   August 16, 2001
G. Goodman (Colorado)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful

You will never encounter another literary character on the scale of Joe Lon Mackey. He is sick, depraved, perverted, cruel, and highly entertaining. He probably also exists in many forms in Modern America more than we would like to think about. This novel has exactly zero literary merit, but nonetheless deserves its five stars for the sheer lecherousness of it. You can read it in a few hours and be none the worse for wear because of it.


A wonderfully grotesque black comedy   December 7, 1999
Doug Vaughn
6 out of 7 found this review helpful

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.