SOURCE: "John Rechy's Tormented World," in Southwest Review, Vol. 67, No. 1, Winter, 1982, pp. 78-85.

In the following essay, Satterfield explores the alienated characters and hellish atmosphere which Rechy has created in his first five novels.

In addition to his nonfiction opus, The Sexual Outlaw, John Rechy has written five novels that vividly describe the physical and emotional terrain of the misfit, novels that explore with varying degrees of success the terrifying landscape of the taunted and tortured, of the desperate and deviant, of those who suffer the pain of "lost" life—in short, the damned. What makes Rechy's characters different from the "outsider" figure popular in American literature is that Rechy's people are alienated from themselves and nature as well as society; and what makes Rechy's world crueler than, for instance, Dreiser's is its unrelenting hostility. Rechy evokes not just the indifference of society to pain and suffering, but...