I read this book like thirty years ago (ack!) when I was in college, and I remembered liking it, and when my wife picked it as a classic-ish literary novel, I figured I'd read it while we had a copy in the house. It's ... maybe better than I remembered, even if there aren't a lot of particularly sympathetic characters. There are some strong thematic concerns here, more than I can enumerate or name, obsession and social strata and all-a-that, and probably more. The language in the novel--the prose--is something to sink your teeth into. I can definitely see why people get pulled into this novel repeatedly. It's a shame that so many people are exposed to it in school, have it crammed down their gullets, learn to hate it while it lies dead and quivering on the lepidopterist's pins; it deserves better treatment than that.
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Don't Let the Devil Ride by Ace Atkins
This was a bit of a disappointment for a few reasons. The prose was pretty solid, with some nicely turned phrases, but that's about th...

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Oh, gawds, this novel starts as a bit of a mess and wraps up like someone who read too much Naturalistic fiction and decided to go with no...
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A neat little Horror novel (big shock on the genre, there, I'm sure) that plays some interesting games with PTSD and identity, with ma...
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Reading this novel reminded me a good deal of reading Processed Cheese . America Fantastica is more subtle, and the points it's makin...
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