[Crew's] works, seen together, testify to his leaping imagination, his mission to make us see.

We must see first that his books are imps of the perverse. The Gospel Singer [features a Freak Fair]…. In a way these tent shows are like Harry Crews's novels, each more freakish than the last. Yet his escalation of perversion is balanced by a deepening of compassionate wonder at all that can be contained in the human. As he said in a recent Times interview, "I can say more about what the world out there calls normal by writing about what it calls abnormal." Crews writes about the abnormal without relief, though finally with hope. One of his characters tells her depressed lover: "Whatever's normal is a loss. Normal is for shit." Her words set him free from depression. Similarly, Crews's novels exorcise the shame any person might feel over his perversity; twisted as they are, his novels perform a healing function….

Crews's perverse tales tend to elicit … ambivalent responses. To the extent that freaks are other they are comic, but if you see yourself in the freak they are tragic. Crews catches you in between….

Harry Crews's stress upon the lurid and the perverse is no more than an accurate recounting of the scabrous life and hard times in south Georgia, where maimed, three-legged dogs and sun-cracked people watch the fancy cars rip past on their ways to God-only-knows-where while they are left behind with the lame and the halt and the short end of the stick and the fat in the fire. Any grace they can elicit from this place is truly amazing. Crews calls his memoir "A Childhood: The Biography of a Place" and he evokes place as well as any recent writer, that place that was Bacon County—"all its people and its customs and all its loveliness and all its ugliness."

Crews is one of the last regional writers in a land of fast-disappearing regions…. Because Crews was so shaped by the land and those who walked upon it, for him "the biography of a childhood … is the biography of a place, a way of life gone forever out of the world."

In "Place in Fiction" Eudora Welty says the term "regional" is careless, condescending, an outsider's judgment. For her all worthy fiction grows from a strong sense of place, what she calls "the named, identified, concrete, exact and exacting, and therefore credible, gathering spot of all that has been felt, is about to be experienced, in the novel's progress." That is just what one sees in Crews's novels. At a moment of metafictional displacement, when writers like Pynchon move us through abstract places like San Narcisco, "less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts," it is good to feel the hard sense of festering earth beneath our feet in a Crews novel…. In a sense … all his fiction is transmuted autobiography, a recreation of lost times and remote place.

Still, Harry Crews is a child of his displaced times as well as a son of Bacon County. These are times when most of us have more elliptical relations to particular places, times when San Narcisco seems real, times when apologists for metafiction try to pry the novel loose from that sense of certain place Welty insisted upon. In his introduction to an anthology, Superfiction, for example, Joe David Bellamy says the "new fiction" subverts "the implicit attitude of much conventional fiction that reality is a thing, essence, landscape we can all agree upon and wish fervently for art to imitate." The landscapes we can no longer agree are there are called "fields of force" in Robert Scholes's Structural Fabulation. Crews's own move from south Georgia to northern Florida suggests a larger translation from Erskine Caldwell comic naturalism to Nathanael West surrealism.

Despite his sense of particular place, then, Crews's novels occur in a landscape of allegory. His first novel is set in Enigma, Georgia, and his latest in Mystic, Georgia. (p. 6)

Crews's novels, then, beautifully combine a sense of specific place as Welty urged and a translation of place into idea as Bellamy wished. In Scholes's terms they are novels of "fabulation," fiction which "offers us a world clearly and radically discontinuous from the one we know, yet returns to confront that known world in some cognitive way."

That determination to return, that promise of a round-trip ticket back from where the wild things are, distinguishes Crews from other metafictionists. Crews, for example, would not fit comfortably with those praised by William Gass in The World Within the Word. For one thing, for all his personal interest in the development of a useful literary technique, Crews does not contrive his novels as self-reflective metaphoric inquiries into the nature of the form; he does not write of the kind of "life" which never escapes the mirror's surface, as Gass prefers. Nor are Crews's novels what Gass would find to praise in Nabokov's: "fragrant petals of pure relation." Rather, Crews's books tend to stink of life. The heritage of the Southern literary renaissance abides in his work, that sensuousness that Flannery O'Connor praises in "The Nature and Aim of Fiction." Crews's novels meet her standard that "fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust."

Yet Crews too builds out of dust worlds within words and other things which his characters perceive as graven images…. Again and again in Crews's novels characters place their faith in substitute gods or gurus, those who can promise to lift them out of the slough of their own despondent beings. (pp. 6-7)

When a Crews character finally accepts the hard fact that there is no way out but feet first he does what Joe Lon Mackey did when he "accepted for the first time that things would not be different tomorrow. Or ever. Things got different for some people. But for some they did not." As they might say in Bacon County, the thing of it is, you can't get there from here—this thing don't lead to heaven. Joe Lon Mackey blew himself away with a twelve-gauge shotgun.

In earlier works "love" was sometimes held out as an anodyne, a compensation for the loss one feels when trained by hymns like "The World Is Not My Home." Yet no other world offers itself…. However, in Snakes Crews's faith in redemptive love seems diminished, for there Joe Lon decided "he did not know what love was. And he did not know what good it was. But he knew he carried it around with him, a scabrous spot of rot, of contagion, for which there was no cure." When Joe Lon blows his head off, he scatters all thought of transcendent love, eliminates its disease.

Yet a kind of faith remains in Crews's black humor, as is clear from A Childhood where he goes home again "to write about Bacon County and how life was there before the people who can remember all die." Crews celebrates a capacity to survive in the face of every kind of hard time…. It is a principal part of Harry Crews's mission as a writer to record the life that was lived there, to set down the stories, to give coherent shape to the terrors associated with life as he has seen it. But most of what he has experienced has been at once brutal naturalism and extravagant metafiction. Like all good works, his novels reteach us to see the world, better allow for its freakishness, another term for its "magic."

Harry Crews, then, might be seen as a neo-Gothic novelist, one who combines elements of terror and wonder as Mario Praz once wrote successful Gothic fiction should, yet one who incorporates into his fiction much of the "real," his sense of place….

Crews notes in A Childhood that back in Bacon County when he was a boy he and his friends used to recoil from the facts of their existence and make up stories about the magical and beautiful characters in the Sears, Roebuck Catalogue. They called this publication, their only contact with a wider world of print culture, their Dream Book. Thus from the first of his works to his latest Harry Crews has been writing a series of Dream Books, works which simultaneously incorporate and transcend his personal history. So in the end the Word is, after all, the only way out, just as it is the best way in.

In many works of compelling fiction Harry Crews has concocted elaborate metaphors, images more sustainingly inventive than most metafictionists, tropes which subsume his past, conceits which widen our sense of the possible as they make the magical and the freakish more plausible. (p. 7)