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Pitiful Criminals
In Pitiful Criminals , Greg Bottoms offers thirteen genre-bending chapters from his past that take a close look at the lives of small-time criminals driven, often by confusion and desperation, to deeds that range from the absurd to the heinous. We meet the author’s schizophrenic arsonist brother, a depressed pot grower, a damaged ex-dealer who barely escaped a violent burglary, a born-again teenage shooter, and other alienated Americans pushed to extremes by psychology and circumstance. Forceful, poetic, unique, and utterly uncompromising, it is an unforgettable tour of the dark side of the human condition.
Greg Bottoms’s innovative fiction and creative nonfiction have focused on the American South, the effects of violence on individual lives, criminal behavior, mental illness, ecstatic and spiritual experience, and class in America. He blends explicitly autobiographical and biographical content with artful storytelling, a cultural journalist’s observations, and a philosopher’s deep inquiry into the strange ways we live now. This is postmodern crime fiction at its gritty and original best.
Greg Bottoms’s innovative fiction and creative nonfiction have focused on the American South, the effects of violence on individual lives, criminal behavior, mental illness, ecstatic and spiritual experience, and class in America. He blends explicitly autobiographical and biographical content with artful storytelling, a cultural journalist’s observations, and a philosopher’s deep inquiry into the strange ways we live now. This is postmodern crime fiction at its gritty and original best.
- GenresNonfiction
204 pages, Paperback
First published July 21, 2014
30 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
October 24, 2014
You have to have a taste for the odd to enjoy this book. It's a quick read, more like an exotic hors d'oeuvre; something to keep for those moments while you are stuck inside or waiting in the car.
This has led me to check out some of Bottoms other works. We shall see!
This has led me to check out some of Bottoms other works. We shall see!
August 9, 2018
Wow, I really liked this book.
"Pitiful Criminals" is a look into crimes and the people who do them. The crimes that make up this book are mostly culled from the author's personal experiences growing up around the Tidewater region of Virginia. This book is a kind of nonfiction fiction, with real people and made-up events and vice versa. It's a very well written book and contains thirteen selections, some of which were really heartbreaking ("The Shooter," "The Minister's Handyman"), others which probe the social and racial implications of crimes ("Two Bodies," "A Couple of Ways to Kill Yourself," and "Half of What I Thought I Knew"), and some that were quite hilarious ("The Truce," for instance). There are illustrations here as well, which were really nice and brought the subject matter of the book into clearer focus.
What the author really brings out here is the ever-present debate of choice vs. fate. None of these criminals are geniuses, yet all of them had to cope with the implications of decisions made long before the opportunity to commit a crime was presented to them. The rapist and murderer of a woman was also sexually abused as a child. A mentally ill man, who happens to be the author's brother, attempts to kill his family because there are very few resources to help him. A young pot grower becomes an informant because he wants to avoid jail time. There are choices and then the choices from those choices, and one of the things apparent in this book is the author asking over and over again how we would choose in the same situation. The conclusion is that we're not much different from these people.
Anyway, four stars. This is a great read.
"Pitiful Criminals" is a look into crimes and the people who do them. The crimes that make up this book are mostly culled from the author's personal experiences growing up around the Tidewater region of Virginia. This book is a kind of nonfiction fiction, with real people and made-up events and vice versa. It's a very well written book and contains thirteen selections, some of which were really heartbreaking ("The Shooter," "The Minister's Handyman"), others which probe the social and racial implications of crimes ("Two Bodies," "A Couple of Ways to Kill Yourself," and "Half of What I Thought I Knew"), and some that were quite hilarious ("The Truce," for instance). There are illustrations here as well, which were really nice and brought the subject matter of the book into clearer focus.
What the author really brings out here is the ever-present debate of choice vs. fate. None of these criminals are geniuses, yet all of them had to cope with the implications of decisions made long before the opportunity to commit a crime was presented to them. The rapist and murderer of a woman was also sexually abused as a child. A mentally ill man, who happens to be the author's brother, attempts to kill his family because there are very few resources to help him. A young pot grower becomes an informant because he wants to avoid jail time. There are choices and then the choices from those choices, and one of the things apparent in this book is the author asking over and over again how we would choose in the same situation. The conclusion is that we're not much different from these people.
Anyway, four stars. This is a great read.
January 29, 2019
I picked this book up in first period with no intention of finishing it by third, yet here I am. I love how the author pulls memories mixed with fiction and true crime into a timeline of different crimes that make this book something the reader is unable to put down. While reading the first story, if I thought it would come back around and be restated in a new light in the last story, I would have payed more attention to every detail. Not to mention the art in this book is really incredible and the shading of each inked piece adds depth and detail to each story. Unexpectedly great read.
October 10, 2024
Wow! The way the author talks about his brother who is diagnosed with schizophrenia is shocking. It's usually all blame and how his brother ruined his (the authors) life by the actions he made that were a part of his schizophrenia.
It also continues all throughout the book. It is a blame the people not the system kind of frame of mind. I will not be reading more from this author and I don't recommend you do either.
It also continues all throughout the book. It is a blame the people not the system kind of frame of mind. I will not be reading more from this author and I don't recommend you do either.
August 16, 2024
Part memoir, part fictionalization, entirely weird.
March 14, 2015
Greg Bottoms may come from suburbia, but he knows about crime—real-life crime, not the Hollywood version you see on TV. His older brother, you see, tried unsuccessfully to kill his family. His name was Michael, and he’d once been a good-looking athlete in Poquoson, Virginia, the boy next door whom everyone admired. But he was also a schizophrenic, and in his teen years became consumed by the demons in his head. They spoke to him while his parents and youngest brother slept (Greg was in college at that time). To silence the voices, to kill the demons, Michael emptied half a gas can on the bottom floor of their rancher, lit a match, and rode off on his mother’s bicycle as the house began to burn. This really happened. And it is the basis for Bottoms's first book, a memoir called "Angelhead," as well as the first and last story in his sixth book, a collection of stories called "Pitiful Criminals."
I say “basis” because Bottoms, who is now a professor of English at the University of Vermont, makes it clear in the opening author’s note that “this book blends autobiography and essay with fictionalized re-creations. ...Imagination plays as significant a part as memory or fact.” Each story is told from the point of view of the same omniscient narrator, which helps to tie all these stories together. At times this link is strong, as when the subject is the narrator’s brother, and other times tenuous, as when the pitiful criminal is twice removed (“I knew a guy who knew this guy”), but voice is consistent. The narrator is Bottoms.
In one story called “Hit and Run,” Bottoms tells about a Norfolk crack addict who tries to rob a 7-Eleven, pretending the steak knife shoved in his pocket is a gun. When the hardened cashier refuses to open the till, a man in line gives him 20 bucks and the addict flees. Then he steals a car and jets off to buy a hit from his dealer, all the while feeling like he’s going to die if he doesn’t get that next fix. As he’s flying along in the stolen car, he plows into a white Nissan and then takes off on foot. And who was driving that Nissan? The narrator.
Just as he does in the “Hit and Run” story, Bottoms delves into the minds and motivations of each criminal featured in these thirteen stories. Even with those who committed horrific acts of their own volition—such as a church handyman who raped and murdered a woman then buried her in the garden she was tending—Bottoms seeks to find the heart of these wretched characters, digging down to the events—such as the handyman having been sexually abused as a child—that might fill the reader with compassion rather than hate.
There are no criminal masterminds in this book. In one story, a small-time drug dealer gets stoned and locks himself out of his own house, located in a nice, quiet suburb. As he is lurking around the house looking for a way in, a patrol car spots him. In a rush to escape, the dealer bashes in the window on the back door. The cops follow him inside, with breaking and entering as a probable cause, and what do they find? A hydroponic grow system with track lights and misters nurturing 80 pot plants.
To deal down his crime, he rolls on a bigger fish in the druggie food chain. As Bottoms writes, “He does think sometimes about ruining the guy’s life, destroying his family. But he couldn’t do jail. Fifteen to twenty years? No way. Someone had to go down for his stupidity and damned if it would be him.”
And that sentiment pretty much sums of the thinking of the criminals in this collection. They all come from sad situations. Some are violent, others deranged, but all are, in one way or another, worthy of pity. And that’s what makes this collection so noteworthy. In giving a tour of the terrible world inhabited by the outcasts and fringe-dwellers of society, Bottoms exposes us to the intolerable circumstances that lead to their poor choices. His search for underlying causes to their crimes puts us as readers in a potion where we must question what we might do in the same situation. It leaves us wondering: are we really so different from any of these aimless souls?
I say “basis” because Bottoms, who is now a professor of English at the University of Vermont, makes it clear in the opening author’s note that “this book blends autobiography and essay with fictionalized re-creations. ...Imagination plays as significant a part as memory or fact.” Each story is told from the point of view of the same omniscient narrator, which helps to tie all these stories together. At times this link is strong, as when the subject is the narrator’s brother, and other times tenuous, as when the pitiful criminal is twice removed (“I knew a guy who knew this guy”), but voice is consistent. The narrator is Bottoms.
In one story called “Hit and Run,” Bottoms tells about a Norfolk crack addict who tries to rob a 7-Eleven, pretending the steak knife shoved in his pocket is a gun. When the hardened cashier refuses to open the till, a man in line gives him 20 bucks and the addict flees. Then he steals a car and jets off to buy a hit from his dealer, all the while feeling like he’s going to die if he doesn’t get that next fix. As he’s flying along in the stolen car, he plows into a white Nissan and then takes off on foot. And who was driving that Nissan? The narrator.
Just as he does in the “Hit and Run” story, Bottoms delves into the minds and motivations of each criminal featured in these thirteen stories. Even with those who committed horrific acts of their own volition—such as a church handyman who raped and murdered a woman then buried her in the garden she was tending—Bottoms seeks to find the heart of these wretched characters, digging down to the events—such as the handyman having been sexually abused as a child—that might fill the reader with compassion rather than hate.
There are no criminal masterminds in this book. In one story, a small-time drug dealer gets stoned and locks himself out of his own house, located in a nice, quiet suburb. As he is lurking around the house looking for a way in, a patrol car spots him. In a rush to escape, the dealer bashes in the window on the back door. The cops follow him inside, with breaking and entering as a probable cause, and what do they find? A hydroponic grow system with track lights and misters nurturing 80 pot plants.
To deal down his crime, he rolls on a bigger fish in the druggie food chain. As Bottoms writes, “He does think sometimes about ruining the guy’s life, destroying his family. But he couldn’t do jail. Fifteen to twenty years? No way. Someone had to go down for his stupidity and damned if it would be him.”
And that sentiment pretty much sums of the thinking of the criminals in this collection. They all come from sad situations. Some are violent, others deranged, but all are, in one way or another, worthy of pity. And that’s what makes this collection so noteworthy. In giving a tour of the terrible world inhabited by the outcasts and fringe-dwellers of society, Bottoms exposes us to the intolerable circumstances that lead to their poor choices. His search for underlying causes to their crimes puts us as readers in a potion where we must question what we might do in the same situation. It leaves us wondering: are we really so different from any of these aimless souls?
March 25, 2015
Short, but very interesting.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews