I was at a dinner this past summer and a girl named this book when I asked if she had a favorite. I looked it up the next day, saw the author had a documentary made about him and had some sort of cult following, and mostly since he was a Georgian, I was intrigued. On my lunch break (This was in the midst of the bad old days of commuting three hours each way to work in Manhattan), I ran down to the Union Square Barnes and Noble to see if they had it. The girl who’d mentioned it had invited the wife and I to a party the following month and I thought it would be nice if I could tell her I’d read the book she’d mentioned. But B&N didn’t have it. And money was tight, so I took it as a sign and felt some measure of relief to leave the book store with the same amount of money as I’d gone in with.

Fast-forward seven months to these glory days of a job that’s not three hours away (Not even three minutes!) and I was in the main drag of my little town and ran into a buddy who was looking to offload a duffel bag full of books. Since I work at the library and we constantly accept donations, I took him down the road and we walked in and unpacked the books. Several he said he wanted to give to me so I could read them (The well-known AMERICAN PSYCHO, as well as ones I’d never heard of, THE FORGOTTEN HERO OF MY LAI: THE HUGH THOMPSON STORY, and SURVIVING HITLER, sitting now on my study’s reading table). And there, among the books, is A FEAST OF SNAKES.

Intrigued that two people in a tiny town should have both read the same not-very-well-known (I think) book, I grabbed it and took it home with the others.

Isn’t that a neat little story?

You know what isn’t so much?

Harry Crews’ A FEAST OF SNAKES.

It’s a nice, tight little book, and it was engaging and pulled me in and I enjoyed reading it. It leaned toward vulgarity but was never overly sensational, and I respected the restraint. I was open to liking it until the last two pages, when it took a turn toward the sort of grimey, hardcore, pseudo-literary unflinchingness that punk middle-schoolers tend to fawn over. Ultimately, it threw out too many lines of metaphor and never pulled anything very weighty in.

But, as always, this is just my opinion. Two friends dug it, and Joseph Heller raves about it on the front cover. And he wrote a good book once, before he wrote a bunch of others.