The trouble with The Terrible Twos is that [Reed has] said it all before and said it much better. This time out, he's picked another genre to tear apart with his imposition of varied forms and combinations of perspective. Just as he used Antigone in The Last Days of Louisiana Red to create a brilliant satire that collapsed under the strain of its near-misogyny, and just as he used the western for Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, the detective story for Mumbo Jumbo, the slave narrative and Uncle Tom's Cabin for Flight to Canada, Reed weaves Rastafarianism and a reverse of the Todd Clifton dummy sequence from Invisible Man together with Dickens's A Christmas Carol in The Terrible Twos. Again we get the self-obsessed harpies, the mission Indians, the black hero who takes over the white form (unlike Todd Clifton, Black Peter is not controlled by whites who speak...