Central to the action, relationships, and themes in A Feast of Snakes is Joe Lon Mackey, former Boss Snake of the Mystic, Georgia, high school football team (The Rattlers). Prevented by illiteracy from further triumphs in college athletics, Joe Lon is trapped in Mystic. He lives in a trailer with an overwhelmed wife and two screaming babies. He spends his time selling bootleg liquor from his father's store, working his father's pit bulls, lifting weights, and organizing the annual tourist attraction — the rattlesnake round-up. His frustration at this aimless and tawdry life expresses itself in frequent attacks of unmotivated rage, often directed at his loving but ineffective wife. Joe Lon's own disintegrating family is a spiritual echo of the one that produced him: a coldly brutal father whose life is the torture training of pit bulls, an absent mother (who abandoned her family for her lover and...