A Feast of Snakes is all the things it was meant to be—fast, horrifying, funny. The snake round-up is rich swampland. And the vim and style of the telling are not much impaired by an uneasy shifting of narrative stance. Joe Lon's reflections on his life seem too portentiously elegiac for a dumb football star. Rentafreak have supplied one or two characters: the one-legged sheriff, the crazy sister in the back room. Readers will also note that phantasmagoric condoms and chopper-chopping are rather fashionable this year…. Nevertheless, Mr. Crews can more than hold his own in the blacker-than-thou arts.

What pulls the book down is the weight of its morality. The wickedness of the competitive ethic is made evident by the material, but the material is never allowed to escape from it. The author's desire to demonstrate how America sets man against man and turns neighbours into...