SOURCE: “Spelunking,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, March 15, 1998, p. 8.

In the following negative review, Richardson expresses her disappointment with Cavedweller, describing the novel as unconvincing, overly dramatic, and lacking focus.

Dorothy Allison put the dirt into dirty realism: real dirt and poverty and violence. In her first novel, Bastard Out of Carolina, she re-created the controlled hysteria of a household that frequently erupts with beatings and sexual abuse. Unlike people who have capitalized on the shock value of such stories, Allison succeeded in directing generations of brutality, anger and disgust into a cogent, skillfully formed and developed narrative.

Her biographical essays and stories describe unflinchingly the grim conditions of life in the impoverished hinterland of the American South. In the preface to Trash, she explains what compels her: “I put on the page a third experience of a cross-eyed working-class lesbian, addicted to violence, language, and hope...