A splendid new novel that probes the psyche and antics of Duffy Deeter, a lawyer with violent tendencies who suffers from alienation.All We Need of Hell plunges us once again into the irresistible unpredictability of Harry Crews’s tough and touching world. Funny, mordant, and tender all at once, All We Need of Hell spits right in the eye of America’s worst traits - violence, materialism, self-absorption, and the drive to dominate - and shows how they lead not to a sense of power but to despair. Add several ounces of Crews’s wry humor, plus a wonderful cast of eccentric, entertaining characters, and suddenly a deranged world becomes one in which miracles are possible—and sometimes even happen. At the heart of the book is Duffy Deeter, obsessed with physical fitness and images of death, and aware that his life is coming apart at the seams. Losing his hold on imself, his wife, and his son, he struggles desperately to hang on. just when everything is as bad as it could possibly be, a man who once tried to maul Duffy in a vicious handball match steps forward to help him. A virtuoso blending of despair and hope, All We Need of Hell is a provocative book by one of America’s finest Southern storytellers. From Publishers WeeklyCrews's 10th novel describes the frustrated rage that possesses inept lawyer Duffy Deeter, who seeks heart's ease through a bizarre physical fitness regimen. His life is further complicated by a gum-chewing mistress, once a Woodrow Wilson Fellow; a wife with naturally silver hair who is as glacial as the North Pole; an overweight adolescent son; a law partner who has been making time with Mrs. Deeter; a mother whose belfry doesn't have 12 chimes for midnight; and a black professional athlete. What binds these aberrant types together in a compelling narrative is a remarkable gift for incisive language: Duffy's father, a World War II fighter pilot, "bit the big bagel"; "gold was good, a commodity that always gave the same answer"; and, "In the nation of the heart, there's war enough for everybody." That Duffy finds salvation is the most surprising twist of all. From Library JournalCrews once wrote in Playboy about the joys of getting beaten up. Now comes Duffy Deeter, also of Gainesville, Florida, also husband and father, also believing "there was nothing so refreshing as getting your ass kicked." Deeter's athleticism would seem to offer little prospect of reconciling him with his distracted mother, his boy ("a huge, soft, white slug"), or his wife, who has become frigid (except with Deeter's law partner). Luckily, Deeter gets into a fight with black pro-footballer Tump Walker; they become fast friends and Walker is soon putting things to rights in the Deeter household. Crews and Deeter are to be congratulated for their suspicion that there might be a better way to live, but sincerity undermines satire and slapstick. The result is not likely to please Crews's old audience nor find him a new one.From Kirkus ReviewsCrews' first novel in ten years (The Gypsy's Curse, 1974; A Feast of Snakes, 1976), and for the first half he's at his weird, wacky best; but the book thereafter degenerates into sentimentality and antic posturing. Duffy Deeter, a 40-year-old Gainesville, Florida, lawyer, is a physical fitness nut to end all physical fitness nuts--a karate expert who can mn a 4:37 mile and ride his "handmade Gitane Tour de France ten-speed touring machine" 40 miles an hour: "His hard supple ankles rolled delicately under pointed calves that melded in a single flow of muscle to thighs that could do ten deep squats with three hundred pounds, exactly twice his body weight." But to his wife, Tish, and fat, lazy son Felix, he's a petty dictator, a kind of Great Santini. When he forces Felix to spend a grueling hour on the Nautilus machine, Tish kicks him out of the house and clears out his bank accounts--it turns out she's been having an affair with his law partner, a pompous ex-footballer named Jeff McPhester. Duffy gets his revenge by sneaking into his own bedroom one night and whacking McPhester on the butt with a fraternity paddle, but is saved from further violence by his friend, huge, black Tump Walker, "the baddest-assed running back in the NFL." Tump invites Jeff, Tish, Felix, and Duffy to his palatial condo for a tiresome comedy of errors, which ends in Tish and Duffy's reunion and his stunned realization that Felix really isn't such a slobby kid after all (Duffy just wasn't paying attention). Duffy is a classic Crews character, but he's wasted in this pointless novel, with its contrived happy ending. Crews can do, and has done, a lot better.

From the novelist The New Yorker called "a writer of extraordinary power," A Feast of Snakes is a wildly weird and breathtakingly original visit to the rural south and the exotic subculture that erupts in all its glory at the Rattlesnake Roundup in Mystic, Georgia.Joe Lon Mackey, a former All-American running back now without purpose or pleasure in his life, decides that the gathering of snake-hunters in his hometown is he ideal opportunity to get some attention. His search for excitement triggers a bizarre series of events - including adultery, castration, suicide, and murder - as Harry Crews once again presents a macabre, hilarious, and irrestible version of the human comedy."Absolutely stunning ... Crews is in the first ranks of American novelists." - Jonathan Yardley,The Miami Herald"Crews ... has a cool, pungent, almost hair-raising writing style, deceptively simple and fluid ... plus a marvelously wry sense of humor ... No number of adjectives in the thesaurus can do justice to the dazzlingly bizarre nature of Crews's creations." - Kenneth Turan,The Washington Post Book World"A Feast of Snakes is a brief but absolutely stunning novel, one that upon a couple of occasions left me quite breathless." - San Francisco ChronicleAmazon.com ReviewWelcome to Mystic, Georgia. This going-nowhere town hosts the annual Rattlesnake Roundup, which attracts thousands of visitors for a rough 'n' rowdy weekend of your basic primate behavior--hard drinking, ogling bikini-clad contestants in the Miss Mystic Rattle beauty contest, betting on dog fights, snake catching, and snake eating. Meet Joe Lon Mackey. He lives in a trailer in Mystic with his lumpy, devoted wife and two hollerin' young'uns. His days of glory as the Boss Snake of the Mystic Rattlers football team are over, and he didn't have the grades to go to college. He's just now realizing that his dreary business selling beer, bonded whiskey, and moonshine is all he's gonna get in the way of a destiny.As the crowds for the Roundup start to overfill the camping area, Joe Lon feels on the inside like a barrel of snakes: "a writhing of the darkness, an incessant boiling of something thick and slow-moving." As he and his good ol' buddy get ready to wander around and check out the scene, Joe Lon says, "Just a bunch of crazy people cranking up to git crazier. But that's all right. Feel on the edge of doing something outstanding myself."A Feast of Snakes is probably the most skillfully crafted and entertaining novel ever written in which a fed up person goes violently berserk. But Harry Crews belongs to the tradition of great Southern weird writers such as Flannery O'Connor, so A Feast of Snakes is richer than that: Crews serves up the reality of people's savage and unrelenting cruelty toward animals and toward each other, stark truths about human despair, male-female face-offs at their sexiest and most ruthless, and (here's his real genius) humor so powerful you can't help but laugh--even though it hurts when you do. A Feast of Snakes, first published in 1976, is a dazzling and flawless horror novel. --Fiona Webster