SOURCE: Maliszewski, Paul. Review of The Devil's Larder, by Jim Crace. Review of Contemporary Fiction 22, no. 1 (spring 2002): 128.

In the following review, Maliszewski offers a favorable assessment of The Devil's Larder.

The Devil's Larder is a collection of sixty-four very short stories—the longest several pages, the shortest just two words—having to do with cooking and eating all sorts of food, from extravagant dishes to ordinary cans. Crace, the author of six novels, including Quarantine and Being Dead, sets his stories in an unnamed village. Many of the stories arise from the village's collective identity as a culturally distinct place beset by outsiders. Villagers versus those tourists, those university students, and those rich people just driving through are conflicts that play out in a number of stories told from the villagers' point of view. (When a chef intentionally starts serving plates of bad mussels to visiting troublemakers, the...