SOURCE: "Death, Sleep & the Traveler: John Hawkes' Return to Terror," in Critique, Vol. XVII, No. 3, April, 1976, pp. 26-38.

In the following essay, Greiner offers a close analysis of terror in John Hawkes's Death, Sleep & the Traveler, noting that the "pure terror" of the novel represents Hawkes's movement away from the comic horror that characterized his earlier works.

John Hawkes has spent most of his adult life probing the "psychic sores" of his grotesque characters. Beginning with Charivari and The Cannibal in 1949, he has combined experimental technique with narratives of extraordinary pain and violence to expose the murky interiors of what many people call "reality." Yet despite the shocking images, the revelations of pain, and the investigations of ugliness and failure, Hawkes has always considered himself a comic novelist. Many readers will recall a 1966 interview in which he insisted that "I have always thought that my fictions, no matter...