A Feast of Snakes by Harry Crews

First published: 1976

Type of plot: Realism

Time of work: The late twentieth century

Locale: Mystic, Georgia

Principal Characters:

• Joe Lon Mackey, a disillusioned liquor-store manager and former high school football hero
• Willard Miller, the current high school football hero
• Buddy Matlow, the sheriff of Mystic
• Beatriz “Beeder” Mackey, Joe Lon’s demented sister
• Elfie Mackey, Joe Lon’s abused wife

The Novel

Set in the rural backwoods of Georgia, A Feast of Snakes is a surreal romp through the dementia of the annual Rattlesnake Roundup, the only event for which the town of Mystic has gained repute. In the same Southern Gothic vein of his predecessors William Faulkner and James Dickey, Harry Crews delivers a vision of a South beset by demons of the past and nightmares of an uncertain future. The reader quickly becomes coiled in the lurid, perversely sexual, and often venomous lives of the local population and realizes that Mystic is no place for the timid or the sane.

The work is divided into two parts, the first of which is a nostalgic attempt to reclaim the past and the second of which deals with the unchanging present and the perpetual future. Narration, which is in the third person, weaves in and out of a variety of perspectives in a dislocated, uneven, but compelling fashion.

The story begins as the town of Mystic prepares for the Rattlesnake Roundup, the only consistent but slippery glue that holds the plot together. Joe Lon Mackey, the former Boss Snake of the Mystic Rattlers, the high school football team, lurks in the shadows watching the baton twirlers and the current team practice for the big game that is a feature of the Roundup. Realizing his days as local hero have passed, Joe Lon wanders away to the liquor store, which he manages for his father, Big Joe, and then home to his trailer, his unappealing wife Elfie, and their two babies. After successfully starting an argument, which is obviously patterned behavior, Joe Lon stomps out of the house and returns to the liquor store, where he engages in his usual daily ritual of drowning his sorrows in his own product. George, a black man who is Joe Lon’s employee, begs Joe Lon to intercede with the sheriff to release Lottie Mae, a black woman who has been jailed. Joe Lon is aware of the sheriff’s penchant for arresting women he finds attractive, and he promises to do what he can. A variety of regulars enter the store and the plot throughout the evening, including the current Boss Rattler Willard Miller, his girlfriend and baton twirler, Hard Candy Sweet, and the sheriff, Buddy Matlow. Joe Lon keeps his promise to George by talking to Buddy Matlow and is reminded again of his longed-for past by Willard and Hard Candy, whose sister Berenice Joe Lon dated in high school.

The narrative view switches from Joe Lon to Buddy Matlow, who returns to the jail and dismisses his deputy. The sheriff pulls a snake from his collection—everyone in the story has a pit, sack, or cage filled with serpents—and places the creature in the cell with Lottie Mae, giving her a choice between him and the snake. Petrified, the girl chooses the sheriff, but she never takes her eyes away from the snake as she sinks slowly into a quiet departure from sanity.

Other stories in this section randomly move from perspective to perspective. Big Joe, Joe Lon’s father, is shown abusing Tuff, a dog he is preparing for a fight. Joe Lon’s sister, Beeder, who never leaves her room and lives in the make-believe world of television, is also depicted, and Berenice Sweet returns from college with a new boyfriend in tow.

Part 2 introduces Duffy Deeter and Susan Gender, who have traveled from the University of Florida for the Roundup and who become entangled in the lives of Joe Lon, Willard, and Hard Candy. They plot to facilitate a private moment between Joe Lon and Berenice, which in turn fosters Joe Lon’s ultimate loss of his hold on reality. A bonfire, the dogfight, and the consumption of increasingly large amounts of alcohol preview the main event, in which hundreds of mad, drunken tourists and locals are loosed on a population of unsuspecting rattlesnakes. As he watches the mass of people spill into the woods, Joe Lon, in a moment of inebriated lucidity, determines his purpose in life, removes his rifle from his truck’s gun rack, and begins to fire into the crowd, wounding, among others, Berenice, the deputy, and the snake-handling preacher. After he empties the chamber and reloads, the people around him loft his body into the rattlesnake pit to swim among the snakes.

The Characters

To say that Harry Crews deals in stereotypes is oversimplifying his mastery of storytelling and his vision of the South. Through characterization, he drags his readers into the perverted and violent lives of the populace of the rural South, those often characterized as “rednecks,” and abandons them there with a slender thread of story line. Although this is a landscape of unfamiliar, sick, and often repulsive characters, readers become involved with and empathetic toward characters with whom they should find no identity. In this, Crews is a master of characterization—in making the absurd and abnormal appear logical and sane. Although the characters and the narration are random and diverse, Crews makes each character oddly credible and vaguely recognizable, as if he taps the unconscious characterization in his readers or explores the recesses of their genealogical closets.

Although “stereotypes” is too bland an assessment, one must note that Crews deals in types: the deflated former athletic hero trapped in a dull reality from which he sees no escape, among persons who no longer cheer his shallow victories; the image of his sister Beeder—the “mad woman in the attic”—who, having witnessed her mother’s suicide, now refuses to participate in the real world, preferring to dwell in the fabricated reality of television; Buddy Matlow, the sheriff, who abuses his power to whet his sexual appetites and receives the ultimate punishment to fit the crime; Big Joe, Joe Lon’s father, who personifies the rural Southern macho image by breeding dogs to kill one another, persecuting them during training and kicking them to death if they lose; Elfie, the abused wife, who defends and supports her husband regardless of his sins and his treatment of her; the African American community, including George and Lottie Mae, who “know their place” and play the expected role in the presence of the white men in the community; Duffy Deeter and Susan Gender, typical college students seeking a weekend diversion; Berenice and Hard Candy Sweet, the daughters of wealth and prominence and the purveyors of easy virtue; and a jumble of minor characters who, with their own peculiar peccadillos, propel the plot along.

The focal point of the tale is Joe Lon Mackey; no matter how far astray the narration travels, it returns to him. Although he is only twenty-one, Joe Lon realizes that his life is over, that he is in a fixed mold from which there is no escape. He remembers the adoration of the fans and dreads the bleakness of the future. Although readers can easily identify him as a monster, there is a subconscious rooting for change in his life and the recognition of his humanity. Within the meandering narration and the essentially nonexistent plot of the work, it is Joe Lon, monster or not, for whom the reader silently cheers.

Critical Context

Harry Crews is consistent is his creation of surreal worlds wherein people act outside the realm of normalcy. He was born in the rural town of Alma, Georgia, and grew up as the son of agrarian parents; many critics thus seek autobiographical elements in his novels, an approach spurred in part by his work A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (1978). Crews, though, transcends the autobiographical to delve into the human emotion and human violence that characterize the best Southern writing, an approach that puts him in the same context as James Dickey and William Faulkner. Early in his writing, he acquired a cult following that propelled his career and helped to shape his vision and his skill as a master storyteller. A Feast of Snakes, which falls chronologically in the middle of his canon, is often considered his best work; it is often recommended to those interested in sport literature because of the graphic renditions of dogfighting. In this, Crews has become a model for writers in sport literature; he has also created other work in that genre, including The Knockout Artist (1988) on boxing and Body (1990) on women’s competitive bodybuilding.

Crews’s work is often classed as black comedy and, indeed, there are touches of wry, often sardonic, humor in even the most compelling of his novels. The works could easily be included in an upper-division university sport literature or modern novels course but would likely be unacceptable for a younger audience.

Bibliography

Crews, Harry. A Childhood: The Biography of a Place. New York: Harper, 1978. Crews’s autobiographical remembrances of his youth, which serve as material for many of his novels.

Jeffrey, David. K., ed. A Grit’s Triumph: Essays on the Works of Harry Crews. Port Washington, N.Y.: Associated Faculty Press, 1983. A collection of scholarly reviews and criticism covering the majority of the Crews canon.

Shepherd, Allen. “Matters of Life and Death: The Novels of Harry Crews.” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 20 (September, 1978): 53-62. Scholarly discussion of the consistency of themes permeating Crews’s novels.

Watson, Sterling. “Arguments over an Open Wound: An Interview with Harry Crews.” Prairie Schooner 48 (Spring, 1974): 60-74. The author discusses the creative process and the source for his material.