Preview of A Feast of Snakes Summary:

One of Crews's darkest novels, A Feast of Snakes, holds within its plot lines, characters, and central symbol nearly all of his major preoccupations.

Those include the failure of social structures (the family, the community, religion, law) to provide meaning; freakishness, obsession, and failure as descriptive of the human condition; sexuality, materialism, and the cult of the physical as attempts to transcend human limitation; the need for objects and rituals to provide meaning; and the inevitability of violence, pain, and death.

The novel's multiple themes and narrative lines all center on the image of the snake. The annual snake-hunt in Mystic, Georgia, the focusing and climactic event toward which the novel moves, reflects grimly but accurately the decadence of contemporary society, motivated by materialism and embracing danger and destruction. Metaphorically, the snake's religious and psychological associations relate it to the religious fanaticism, casual violence...