"Vann's novels are striking, uncompromising portraits of American life; here is another exceptional example."
Vann, whose remarkable novels evoke worlds where violence and revenge seem the inevitable outcome of human relationships, offers here a kind of modern fairy tale, one laced with treachery and trials and the greatest demon of all to battle, the past.
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"This book is as all of Vann's fiction: provocative and unforgiving."
Vann's third novel is his most visceral yet: a grinding examination of killing, God and the unnamable forces that create a dynasty of violence.
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"At turns savage and comic, Vann's richly complex novel does what the best literature does: It makes demands on its readers."
After his widely acclaimed first novel, Vann touches on some of the same themes here: enlightenment through labor, the inevitability of violence, the contentious relationship between mother and son.
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"A carefully crafted account of a descent into fatal madness."
Acclaimed novelist Vann (Caribou Island, 2011, etc.) alternates his own adolescent fantasies about guns and school shootings with those of Steve Kazmierczak, who on Valentine's Day 2008 killed five and wounded 18 on the Northern Illinois University campus before ending his own life.
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"How many mishaps can be described in bilious tones before the audience needs to come up for air?"
The author pursues his dream of becoming a charter-boat captain, even though Lady Luck keeps hitting him on the head as if with a baseball bat.
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