Yonder Stands Your Orphan

by Barry Hannah

The story of how the denizens of a lakeside community in Mississippi are beset by madness, murder and sin in the form of Man Mortimer. Mortimer, a creature of the casinos who looks like the dead country singer Conway Twitty, is a killer who has turned mean and sick.

Genres: Fiction, Southern Gothic, Southern, Literature, Book Club, Literary Fiction, Horror

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Barry Hannah was an American novelist and short story writer from Mississippi. He was the author of eight novels and five short story collections. He worked with notable American editors and publishers such as Gordon Lish, Seymour Lawrence, and Morgan Entrekin. His work was published in Esquire, The New Yorker, The Oxford American, The Southern Review, and a host of American magazines and quarterlies. In his lifetime he was awarded the The Faulkner Prize (1972), The Bellaman Foundation Award in Fiction, The Arnold Gingrich Short Fiction Award, the PEN/Malamud Award (2003) and the Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was director of the MFA program at the University of Mississippi, in Oxford, where he taught creative writing for 28 years. He died on March 1, 2010, of natural causes.

Reviews

[Tony Vacation · Rating 3 out of 5]

While full of lovely moments of freaky Dixie-fried beauty, there are only so many acid-tinged musings on God and trips to the local fishing hole a body can take! This final novel from Mississippi's avenging angel of word-drunk verbosity focuses on a gaggle of aging eccentrics who try to move past the disappointments of life by fishing and building a ramshackle barge. Unfortunately, a local pimp and car thief with Conway-Twitty hair is seriously losing his shit and has taken up the hobby of harassing locals with an arsenal of obscure knives. This Southern Gothic set-up allows Hannah to mosey around in his wild variety of characters' skulls, pontificating on their guilts, their lonlinesses, and their mad and passionate desires. But road beers and outlaw country can only sustain a rambling, baggy narrative for so many pages. A loose metaphor about moral decay and a strange orphanage for children serves as bookends for all the outlandishness packed within this grungy yarn, but it all comes off as murky as a swamp or a person’s rationalization for religious faith. Nonetheless, it ain’t every day you read a book with a haunted saxophone player, a junkie biker turned tattooed evangelist, a sheriff with thespian leanings, a septuagenarian MILF, a misanthrope named Pepper, masochistic camp counselors, a pornographer named Large Lloyd, a car trunk full of skeletons and an evil spirit with the perfect hair.

[Lizz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t write reviews.

This book gave me pleasure. It was alternately warm and cold rain. I laughed and almost cried. Gorgeous.

“We don’t love each other as much as we used to. You can see the uncertain looks, the calculations, the dismissals. People are not even in the present moment. Everybody’s been...futurized. You look in those eyes and see they’re not home, they’re some hours ahead at least.”

“I was now 45, married twice, but I was still a boy, in some kind of trouble in the room, needing to pray for myself in a smaller room, needing to regret this worm of me. I lost my bones it felt like. They were lost, clicking around my shoes.”

“I’m of the ones who watch themselves move and go nowhere. Your face in the crowd who ain’t quite there in every picture.”

[Gregsamsa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full blown FAULKNERGASM, y'all, on the inexhaustible theme: ya cain't trust no one with perfect hair.

[Natalie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Orphan is a beautifully written modern Southern Gothic tale set in Mississippi, with all the good stuff that implies: ex-biker/junkie preachers, fair widows, alcoholic Irish priests who compare themselves to Beckett, insane animal rights activists, violent pimps with fading looks, beautiful torch singers, disgraced doctors trying to find their way back to God, lots of whiskey, even more fishing, and plenty of blood. I love this kind of stuff, and it's even better that Barry Hannah has a preternatural gift for the turn of phrase, internal monologue and spoken dialogue. This is the first Hannah book I've read and I stand impressed.

What further impressed me was the blink-and-miss-it moment near the beginning where a minor character passingly refers to Peter Jackson's Greatest Film Ever, Dead Alive - not only to the film itself but to its best scene, the Priest Who Kicks Ass for the Lord. Cheers!

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

You ever finish a book and say to yourself 'huh, maybe i missed something.' Because really, at the risk of offending those that really really like this book, I simply don't get it. The novel doesn't confuse me, just the praise it has received. Because I enjoyed the first 1/3 and then it just seemed too meandering, too unfocused, too ephemeral in all the wrong ways. The writing isn't lacking, and-again, perhaps I am wrong-there is a host of interesting characters, but for those compliments the thing is....this books doesn't really go anywhere. There I said it. Nice dialogue-Hannah excels at writing some great vernacular-strewn dialogue-and this has an interesting setting, too. But.not.much.happens. At all. And I can forgive that. I loved the Orchard Keeper by McCarthy that often received the same complaint. But, Mr. Hannah, you are no Cormac McCarthy. (But in your defense, I don't perceive that you think you are anyway.)

[Jamie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I needed something batshit crazy and bighearted, and there’s nobody better for both than Barry Hannah. My favorite when reading him is to forget— just for a minute, just long enough— all the ongoing story and pick a line, any line, to marvel at the mini-story packed inside it.

“Lightning loved the swamp. The willows thrashed now where all the souls of dead bad poets roamed day and night.”

“Spanish words, Japanese thoughts, for these elves of Confederate trash.”

“Here was a man who in his bad, bad days had almost blown Roman over on a gravel road riding his giant Harley next to Roman’s little motorbike, loaded with fish. Now a Christian orator when he was not playing hooky from the Anonymous program.”

“Some things were sin and the others just math.”

A million stories for one, these screwy sentences that ring with drop-dead truth. You could pick a page blind, point and find one. Here. Page 181. “‘Nice,’ said Carl Bob Feeney, less insane than last week.”

[Angus McKeogh · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book pulls off an amazing feat. It's somehow too wordy yet never has enough information to figure out exactly what's happening. Moreover, it's pretty short but reads like a 1,500 page omnibus. Terrible! Skip it!

[Sarah Pascarella · Rating 3 out of 5]

If Federico Fellini and David Lynch commissioned a work to represent the American South, "Yonder Stands Your Orphan" by Barry Hannah would fit the assignment. More a mood piece than a novel, Hannah's work is surreal and strange, with depraved characters, epic violence, and quirky relationships. The storytelling is muted, heavy on allusion and scenery, and Hannah always keeps the reader guessing as to just what exactly is going on--and then interrupts his lulled audience with a blast of violence. I'll most likely read this again in the near future, as I think a second read will shed much more light on the characters and their motivations, series of events, and Hannah's grander intent/larger themes.

I received this book as part of the Transcontinental Book Club.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though I remain ever and always a promiscuous consumer of texts of every stripe, my very favourite flavours when it comes to literary fiction tend to involve prose written w/ the soul of poetry astir therein. YONDER STANDS YOUR ORPHAN finds Hannah as much a poet as he ever was, and I hold it to be his finest novel (of those I have read) subsequent to his towering debut, GERONIMO REX, which is simply one of the very greatest American novels ever written. Hannah does indeed write prose w/ the soul of a poet. A southern-fried poet, at that, w/ more than a passing acquaintance w/ the spiritual properties of corn whisky. A reformed drunkard like myself, I recognize in Hannah a familiarity w/ highs, high-lonesomeness, harsh crashes, mean come-downs, and various hues of despond. And one cannot address Hannah without addressing him as a writer of the American South. And he is distinctly of the Flannery O'Connor school rather than the William Faulkner school (I have a preference for hard and simple poetics of O'Connor over the spray-of-automatic-fire I associate w/ Faulkner). YONDER STANDS YOUR ORPHAN, like RAY before it, is also a book that almost joyfully turns its gaze on some pretty nasty business, and one gets the impression that it is difficult to spend any considerable time in Mississippi without looking out on apocalyptic vistas or becoming privy to apocalyptic narratives. Lives in Hannah can often be seen living themselves into some pretty dire corners, and things get as dire here as they ever get in Hannah, but he goes there w/ human warmth and w/ that breathless voice, that poetry, that humbling elegance of prosody. The way Hannah marries here fine writing w/ the kind of hard-won wisdom without which it would be useless (for all intents and purposes), is inspirational in the extreme. I have a special soft spot for powerful, elegant literary fiction that is funny, wise, and has broad(ish) appeal. I rate Hannah w/ Charles Portis, Thomas Berger, Thomas McGuane, and his Southern near-contemporary Harry Crews as the leaders of the pack as far as this sort of fiction goes (in the post-war American context). YONDER STANDS YOUR ORPHAN is as wise and formidable as any plain-old-fun-to-read novel you are ever likely to come across.

[Wade · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I like this book more than it deserves I think a lot of people like it less than it does. That Hannah can use one of the character's identity as a bad poet to literary effect is also indicative of the way this book is written as a whole, and I don't mean that as a detraction. If the book is not completely successful in its aims, that failure is only mirroring, in not an entirely unconscious manner, what is one of the major themes of the book. Is that a copout? Probably, but I don't care.

[William · Rating 2 out of 5]

on page 145, don't know if I can finish. don't know what's going on. what is the point. rambling.

[Andy Weston · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a good story here, but its hidden in too much unrelenting bleakness, too many words and too many characters. There comes a limit to the depravity depicted; the reader becomes hardened to it, and consequently it has less of an impact.
In the swamp-ridden Mississippi town Hannah creates the residents spend their time fishing, fighting, drinking and screwing around. They are so unequivocally desolate that there becomes a sameness to them. The majority are introduced in the first couple of chapters, with a vignette concerning each of them, but still, for me, there were too many to remember.
The plot holds good though; two of the most odious of the population, a husband and wife (barely), reach an epiphany after a really bad few episodes, and found an orphanage.
Hannah clearly was talented, and I want to read more from him. Also, as is evident from the title, he was a Dylan fan. I'm surprised he doesn't make any explanation or use of the title (from Its All Over Now, Baby Blue ), which fits the story well.

[Marianne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loathed this book at the start. Couldn't follow it if I put it down for more than 24 hours. Then, I figured out that I needed to read it slowly. I needed to hear the story in the words. By the final 100 pages I couldn't not read it. I didn't want so much to know how it ended, but how it went on. This is one I will read again

[wally · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the 3rd from Hannah that I've read. He has a way w/words, w/language and that is a joy to read. But this one is also...all over the place. Who is the protagonist? I dunno. The narrative skips easily from one to another often in the same paragraph. Nothing wrong with that but if the reader is not set on reading or there are other distractions available--maybe the news is attuned and there's that breaking story about Mitt's dog, or polygamy, or some gawd-awful story (prop-piece) how the pipeline just won't do)--where was I?

See what I mean?

There is a cast of character here and they are all believable, all every one a walking case...they somehow exist by themselves though surrounded by the madness and insanity of others around them. Or like the kids who seem to be in tag-teams.

Seems like the setting is an Eagle Lake...Mississippi maybe...or Alabama...though there are at least two states mentioned. The south.

Begins:

Inside at the walnut bar leaned the disambulatory god of the lake. The man was both lazy and quick. Many sought him out.

You needed the luck, the stories, the bait, the clarity of the water, the barometric report.

The roadhouse was a mile from Eagle Lake, a plank box of one warped room a mile off the Vicksburg highway and up a piece of neglected gravel. It harked back to the fifties when Vicksburg was wide open. Cecil and Robbie had been coming down from the Delta ever since the days of cotton prosperity.

There is a bit of narrative line, w/one couple--this after the man crucifies them both to the floor of their home--they make this camp for orphans and defend it w/flags and arms. OASS. Orphans against smiling strangers. Yes.

Okay, so them. Then there's this car that shows up, emerges from being submerged by another character yay ago, and these other kids claim that as their own. You know how it is w/boy kids and cars. They set up driving, not it, but another from the junkyard. It moves.

Then there's Man Mortimer, who is perhaps the protagonist, and he's been the something of the area...this that the other. He reaches a point where he loses it cause of the car....mostly.

There's a doc or two, a horn-player or two, a nigger or two--Hannah is not nor has he ever been hampered by political correctness. In fact, looking at the reviews for Ray and I know I saw at least one who spanked him for racism. Verily. Hallelujah.

Onward political soldiers, marching as to war-ar-ar-ar! Now, let's go get the bullies!

He, Hannah, can turn a phrase that is a delight to read as it isn't often one can read such.

[Israel Lawton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read that during his years at Cornell, Thomas Pynchon and his writer buddies started a "micro-cult" around Oakley Hall's 1958 novel "Warlock". I must say, that if I was to start a cult around any English language novel of the 21st century, it would certainly be this one. From the first paragraph (which still rattles in loose paraphrase around in my head like some lopsided jingle) to the soul splitting ending, Hannah's final novel enraptured me. Quite simply, it was everything I hoped my writing could be. I was enraptured with the narrative, deliberately muddled as it was, but it was Hannah's prose that crept under my skin, stole my self control, and misted over my synapses like cheep wine.

Often the novels I love seem to exist just after the last page, a splicing together of narrative and interpretation that lingers in my bloodstream weeks, months, even years after the covers have nestled shut. There is a gripping story here, one with all the implications and labrytnian nuance of the Great American Novel, but this is literature in its highest form, that is to say that the magnificence of its existence comes from a blend of meditated plot with succulent and singular voice. Read this novel if you are prepared to take an unforgiving trip into the hardened yet vulnerable underbelly of the rural south. To describe the Journey as dark would be underhanded; the novel burrows into your morality and sucks feasts upon your sense of morality. It is the scorched heart of America outlined in ink and paper.

I have read interviews with Hannah were he references his love of James Joyce. In many ways Joyce is the perfect European modernist for the south, but not since (yes, I am going to type his name) Faulkner has a writer so fluidly wed Joyce with the American south. My word, of corse, means nothing but I feel moved to state that this novel is an American Literary Event.

[Erica · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was really enjoying this until about halfway through, when I stopped caring. I love his style, his characters, his scenes - but he just kept piling them on top of each other until they stopped being coherent and lost the impression of going anywhere. Maybe when I'm in the mood to just hang out with some weirdos in Mississippi I'll read the rest.

[Jenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every sentence is written to be a story in itself.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

An unusual novel. The author's gift for telling micro stories sometimes obscures the overarching story. But it is a fun ride.

[Andrea]

Quit reading around page 90. Way too many characters introduced—I couldn’t keep track and I could not focus.

[J.C. White · Rating 5 out of 5]

The devil’s got good hair and a Bowie knife, and he’s loitering around the lake with a backseat full of bones.

In Yonder Stands Your Orphan, Barry Hannah delivers a gospel written on bar napkins and shotgun shells, whispered by junkie preachers and howled by haunted saxophone players beneath the bloated moon of a Mississippi nowhere. This final novel, equal parts dirge and delirium, feels less like fiction and more like a fever dream that crawled out of a whiskey bottle and started speaking in tongues.

The story doesn’t so much unfold as erupt. There’s a loose center of gravity, a lakeside Mississippi community littered with the broken, the busted, the barely hanging on. There's Man Mortimer, a pimp and stolen car enthusiast with Conway Twitty's hair and a head full of bad wiring. He prowls the lake like a failed prophet, collecting knives and tormenting everyone in his orbit like a backwoods Mephistopheles. Around him orbits a chorus of misfits and mourners: a disgraced doctor finding God in the weirdest corners of redemption, a widow too beautiful for peace, a sheriff with a flair for Shakespeare, and a tattooed biker who’s taken to preaching about the Lord with the twitchy fervor of a junkyard messiah.

The novel is stuffed to the gills, like a barge taking on water, with grotesques, visionaries, and saints in the loosest sense. You don’t read Hannah for plot precision; you read him for voice, for the jazz of the sentence, for the Mississippi gospel of ruin and grace. His prose spirals and stutters and sings. It groans with soul and bursts with sudden beauty, like shotgun shells filled with glitter and God.

And yet, there is something strangely moral at the rotten core of it all. A metaphor clings faintly to the chaos, the orphanage no one visits, the decay of American small-town myth, the last stand of aging men who never became who they were supposed to be. It's Southern Gothic cranked up to eleven, where Faulkner meets Hunter S. Thompson in a pawn shop parking lot and they fistfight with broken beer bottles over who gets the last word.

You’ll find in these pages ex-junkies fishing for meaning, Irish priests quoting Beckett while spilling bourbon, masochistic counselors, pornographers with metaphysical regrets, and women who are both muses and morticians of every man’s better angels. The book isn’t tidy, it’s as baggy and bloodstained as the world it limns. But it’s alive, more alive than most novels dare to be. It howls and bleeds and occasionally dances. It dares to treat madness not as metaphor, but as the natural condition of people who’ve stared too long at what’s missing and learned to love the echo.

There are flaws, sure. It’s chaotic. Murky. The plot spills out like a liquor store robbery gone sideways. Some threads vanish into the heat shimmer. Some characters feel more ghost than flesh. But maybe that’s the point. These aren’t people meant to be remembered clearly, they’re meant to be felt. Their voices linger like the reverb of a haunted saxophone solo played at a fish fry funeral.

Final Reckoning:
Five stars for the language, which is equal parts moonshine and miracle.
Four stars for coherence, which is beside the point but worth noting.
Five stars for the haunted absurdity of Mississippi, painted with tenderness and fire.
And five for Barry Hannah himself, that mad Southern archangel who wrote as if the world were ending and he had one last book to toss through the smoke.

Yonder Stands Your Orphan is a hymn for the broken, a sermon for the lost, and a last drink with the damned. If the American South ever got up the courage to speak its soul aloud, it would sound something like this.

[Curt Barnes · Rating 5 out of 5]

For those new to Hannah, I'd recommend reading the short story collections first; then, if you're smitten, read this. My enthusiasm for his startling originality is such that even lesser Hannah (as this is, possibly) is worthy of 5 stars. He creates a fresh, combustible language for his dark humor and occasional sense of mystery: what more can anyone want? This was transferred from amazon reviews:
As a solid Hannah fan, I looked forward to this latest with great anticipation and wasn't at all disappointed. To the contrary, I think he's reached a new pinnacle. All of the editorial reviewers comments here are a propos, with the possible exception of the remark that the "plot fails to hold [the characters] into a cohesive story." That reviewer may not have understood that a "plot" isn't needed in this intentionally meandering crazy quilt of a story whose intricate interweavings themselves form the glue of the piece; the linear structure (such as it is) is quite secondary. The trip's the thing, not the destination. Hannah combines his well-known ear for language with a gift for trenchant observation. A reviewer once remarked that every sentence Hannah writes is a surprise, and with this novel the remark is no hyperbole. Every phrase moves along the action, or defines relationships, or conveys insight and/or laugh-out-loud humor. He compresses whole philosophies into throw-away lines. His verbal richness and economy makes for slower reading than with most books (not a problem for me since I like to chew things over anyway), but it's well worth it. Hannah doesn't waste your attention with pap, or filler, or lead-in sentences. It's all meat.
And a caution: reviewers who compare Hannah to McMurtry or Faulkner or other Southerners, if not being downright patronizing, do him a disservice. He's quite aware of literature beyond the confines of the South, thank you. The violence in this novel, while sinister and redolent of that in the larger culture, wants to be read like the over-the-top, Post-modern Pulp Fiction variety. Hannah is a fascinatingly original prose stylist whose world is as unique as Nicholson Baker's or Peter Handke's (two other favorites). Hannah's subjects may be rural and Mississippian, but he's a cutting-edge writer, make no mistake, and one of the very best alive, in my view. [note: alas, Hannah died in 2010]

[b · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hannah’s felicity with language is a treasure to behold. Seems like it always has been, having first read Geronimo Rex years ago, and then Airships as a rebellion from whatever I was assigned at that time in my undergrad.

I guess the most succinct way to talk about this book is to say that it’s a total fucking nightmare (and yes, that’s a good thing). It’s certainly the darkest extended meditation on life and community that I’ve read in my recent memory (which says a lot, after my Cormac McCarthy binge the past two years).

Just enough characters to keep things confusing, and a lot of the violence unfolding rather obliquely, or at times referenced only after the fact. There’s a bit of giddy energy to some of it when it is happening.

Definitely not a politically-correct book, if that’s a deal-breaker for you. It’s not a hateful book, just a book full of hard people who all have a few hateful things to say. I only mention these things because they can be really hard to read for a lot of folks, and they ought to have the heads-up; material never has to be anything specific, and readers ought never be made to suffer thru any material just for the sake of “the novel being beyond politics.”

I don’t think I love this as much as I loved Airships, but it’s probably on par with Geronimo Rex, just a bigger, more meditative and more communal kind of tale than GR was (it seemed very focused in on its young man protagonist, so much so to a detriment at some points).

Glad I read this. Definitely will scratch southern gothic itch for folks who like that, and is very musical for literary types who can appreciate that.

[Margaret Carmel · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Barry Hannah writes the most consistently interesting sentences of any writer in America today"--Sven Birkerts said, on the back of my copy of Yonder Stands Your Orphan.

While I agree with this sentence after reading this book that follows the exploits of a morally corrupt town in a Mississippi lake community, I don't think it is accurate to say that this book was a good one despite all of those interesting sentences.

Hannah's writing is funny and his characters are vast and creative, but it was just too much. At every turn there was something happening, strange, violent, or bizarre. On paper this sounds like a good thing, this book was really just a collection of zany violence and ridiculousness that all happened to take place in the same book.

There were so many characters and so much thread of plot that never seemed to go anywhere or connect that it just seemed to be a well-written mess by the end. Maybe I missed something, but I just kind of felt indifferent to it all, especially with the length lingering over 300 pages.

I would read a Hannah book again given his acclaim, but I wouldn't recommend this to anyone unless you are a hardcore fan of this author.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

The past ain’t coming back, and that future you’ve planned is a nightmare. The current events aren’t much better, but sit down and join us on Eagle Lake among Barry Hannah’s “democracy of the pained, the fearful, the unheard.”

Barry Hannah can flat out write. His love of jazz shows through, a true original. As does his character, Max Raymond, Hannah insists, “my art and path be crooked, in fear there will be a herd of the simple where I want to be.”

This book contains what may be my favorite paragraph yet read:

“Why do people look for science, science fiction and signs of the End? Why do they seek the Revelation of the Apocalypse here and there and chant the old chants of the coming of the Antichrist, the Four Horsemen? Science fiction has already been had, fools. It was the Battle of Kursk, German tanks against Russian tanks, fifty-seven years ago. It was Leningrad, Stalingrad, Moscow, Berlin, idiots! What does it take, a sock in the jaw for you to get it that the Forces of Darkness fought then? The Antichrist on both sides. Piss on Star Wars. Nothing touches WW Two for science fiction and wasteland.”

My first Barry Hannah, certainly not the last.

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautiful prose but nearly without plot and with loose, almost episodic stories. I thought it was about Man Mortimer, but instead read pages over pages about different characters. There's little that happens here. Melanie – a character met by other characters met by another character who has little or no connection to the supposed protagonist – sees people and the narrator switches to those. And this goes on and on without anything significant happening. Pollock does this tremendously better.

I could go on and even say there's no overarching story, just descriptions, but I won't say that because I stopped after 50 pages. Maybe it gets better, but from my experience it rarely does. Especially if you're 50 pages into a book that has only 330.

This is not what I've expected. And coming from Pollock and Harry Crews and McCarthy (so I'm totally into this genre) I was disappointed by this Southern novel.

[Katy · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF

I really wanted to like this. I love Southern Gothic, and I am giving this 2 stars because the descriptions and atmosphere were very vivid and lovely. But there were too many characters, stacked on top of one another so it was impossible for me to make heads or tales of their interactions or relationships. Thankfully, Hannah repeated thsir names and professions often enough I could follow the multiple storylines as they intertangled, but 75 pages from the end I just couldn't courage up the effort to finish. It was exhausting to continue to try and push forward. Maybe one day I'll pick this up and try again from the beginning, now that I'm acquainted with everyone in the tiny fishing town.

[Lindsay · Rating 1 out of 5]

I just couldn't get into this book. I appreciated how the writing was technically very good, but I just could not settle into the character's heads. Not to say that I didn't become fond of some of the characters, but I got them confused, and I don't feel like enough time was spent on any one. They got muddled in my head. I made myself read to page 210 and thought I might be able to power through, but I just don't think so. Maybe I can come back to the book, just to read it passively, but right now it's just not for me. Didn't like it.

[Aren LeBrun · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mr. Barry Hannah is a lion-hearted Mississippi madman whose every sentence brims with revolt against the freeze-dried dumbing down of American letters and American everything else. Contrary to certain complaints here of his "verbosity," "difficulty," etc., Hannah's is clear-eyed, electric prose that surges from clause to clause without an extraneous syllable or a scintilla of mindless autopilot. These pages spill over with story, immaculately realized characters, and turns of phrase that hit you somewhat like seared haddock after years hooked comatose to a tube. Read Barry Hannah!

[Jonny Longballs · Rating 2 out of 5]

Aside from a few good sentences, this book felt like a plotless waste of time. But then again, books like this (Pynchon, Faulkner) always just make me feel less intelligent than the author. Somehow McCarthy makes this style work with being condescending, but this one didn’t do it for me.

I’ll give another Barry Hannah book a try soon though. Cleverly he’s a great author but I just didn’t get this book at all.

[Lewis Manalo · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's been a long time since I read something with such little plot. A lot of the characters are unconventional in a macabre kind of way, but without a plot, the characters must be fascinating. Maybe I'm too cynical, but I found nothing they did very surprising.

There's something of a hazy dream to enjoy in what feels like a collection of prose sketches, but I wasn't in the mood for it.