Harry Crews is … a comic novelist of magnificent gifts. His first novel, The Gospel Singer, was a frenetic sideshow of Georgia poor white trash and their Hochkultur—the faith-healer, the electronic guitar, the lavender, tail-finned Buick with all its windows busted out, a theology that makes a hippie out of St. Thomas Aquinas, an addiction to patent medicines, catatonic sermons and knife fights.

His second novel, Naked in Garden Hills, amplified the matter of the first, searching out stranger perversions and darker roots in the heart. The impact of these two studies of the monstrosity of things has either dulled our response, or Mr. Crews is writing too fast. Were This Thing Don't Lead to Heaven not in the neon glare of its predecessors, it would stand out as an extraordinary novel. Alas, it begins to be repetitious, and gluts the imagination. Still, it has some fine touches...