Crews is a very powerful, at times even outlandish, and uneven novelist. In the tradition of Erskine Caldwell and Flannery O'Connor in his use of the grotesque, Crews has faced directly the problem of encroachment of modernism on the traditional Southern ways of life. He shows in compelling, and often bizarre and violent detail the consequences for modern Southerners of living lives stripped of sustaining tradition and meaning. Crews is ambivalent toward his Southernness…. Crews, interesting as a novelist himself, is also a suggestive instance of a Southerner writing at a time when regional distinctiveness is on the wane, making use of certain traditional Southern concepts, especially the idea of ritual, but dealing with them in the context of a South which is inevitably the modern world. Experiencing the violence and chaos of that world in his very bones, he sensitively and vividly registers the shocks of modern...