Harry Crews's novels … are fast, mean, dangerous, extraordinarily violent, and often horrifyingly funny…. In terms of fictional techniques, Crews is what he says he is, "a very traditional story teller," yet the essence of his art and vision is experiential and aesthetic risk-taking; excess is his mean.

Bizarre and grotesque as his conceptions often are, they are usually surprisingly plausible and consistent: given these people in this situation (large givens), it all follows logically. He possesses his misshapen imaginative world in complete self-confidence, apparently undeterred by pity or compassion. In the skewed intensity of his fiction, much of the known world is excluded, but his obsessive depth of penetration compensates for conventional breadth and variety. His characters' slim hopes of escape from life's entrapment heightens their desperate and often fatal struggles. (p. 53)

One must note at the outset that Crews, who has averaged almost a novel a year...