Books: Fangs

A FEAST OF SNAKES

by HARRY CREWS

177 pages. Atheneum. $7.95.

Flannery O'Connor, the late short-story master from Georgia, once noted that "any fiction that comes out of the South is going to be considered grotesque by the Northern critic, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be considered realistic." At the time—the '50s—it was a convenient arrangement: regionalism provided neat categories for prides and prejudices. But the postwar boundaries could not hold.

Suddenly, it seemed, everybody was writing about his relatives as if they were not only grotesque but absurdly, even proudly grotesque.

Georgia-born Harry Crews has pushed this...

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