[Crew's] works, seen together, testify to his leaping imagination, his mission to make us see.

We must see first that his books are imps of the perverse. The Gospel Singer [features a Freak Fair]…. In a way these tent shows are like Harry Crews's novels, each more freakish than the last. Yet his escalation of perversion is balanced by a deepening of compassionate wonder at all that can be contained in the human. As he said in a recent Times interview, "I can say more about what the world out there calls normal by writing about what it calls abnormal." Crews writes about the abnormal without relief, though finally with hope. One of his characters tells her depressed lover: "Whatever's normal is a loss. Normal is for shit." Her words set him free from depression. Similarly, Crews's novels exorcise the shame any person might feel over his perversity...