SOURCE: A review of Bats out of Hell, in Los Angeles Times Book Review, February 28, 1993, p. 6.

In the following review, Raksin distinguishes the representation of violence in Hannah's works from that of such authors as Bret Easton Ellis.

There's a scene in Barry Hannah's 1989 autobiographical novel Boomerang when Hannah, writing a screenplay at the Malibu mansion of director Robert Altman, realizes that he's working in a beautiful tower of Plexiglas with sea gulls flying overhead and the Pacific rolling in below. Squirming in discomfort at this "white man's dream of peace," Hannah quickly defiles it by turning on the radio: "I needed the music, the tinny loud music, to remind me of all the trouble in the world…. I could not accept Paradise. I had to drag in the bad music and the cigarettes."

Hannah arguably does much the same in [Bats out of Hell], beginning each tale...