Pitiful Criminals
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
In Pitiful Criminals, Greg Bottoms offers thirteen genre–bending chapters from his past that take a close look at the lives of small–time criminals driven, often by confusion and desperation, to deeds that range from the absurd to the heinous. We meet the author's schizophrenic arsonist brother, a depressed pot grower, a damaged ex–dealer who barely escaped a violent burglary, a born–again teenage shooter, and other alienated Americans pushed to extremes by psychology and circumstance. Forceful, poetic, unique, and utterly uncompromising, it is an unforgettable tour of the dark side of the human condition.
Greg Bottoms's innovative fiction and creative nonfiction have focused on the American South, the effects of violence on individual lives, criminal behavior, mental illness, ecstatic and spiritual experience, and class in America. He blends explicitly autobiographical and biographical content with artful storytelling, a cultural journalist's observations, and a philosopher's deep inquiry into the strange ways we live now. This is postmodern crime fiction at its gritty and original best.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Again deriving prose from his troubled life, Bottoms offers 13 short slices of factually based crime fiction. He opens and closes with Michael, his older brother, a paranoid schizophrenic portrayed in harrowingly painful detail in Bottoms's 2005 memoir, Angelhead: My Brother's Descent into Madness. Now, emerging from 15 years in a psychiatric treatment facility for setting the family home ablaze, Michael reaches out for contact, but Bottoms feels forced to "cut him loose" for his own sanity's sake. Other entries, most of them set in suburban Virginia, include "The Minister's Handyman," in which a young woman is stalked, raped, and murdered by a crazed neighbor, who then buries her in her own garden; "The Shooter," about a gun-crazed high schooler; "Scarface," about a drug-dealing pothead with deadly hubris; "Attempted Murder Mystery," about the author's tribulations as a kindhearted landlord; and "The Man Who Found Two Bodies," about the discovery of several young boys' bodies in the woods. Graphically fortified with crude line drawings by W. David Powell, the book depicts these atrocious events with economy, precisely delivering mood and motive in the span of a page or two. Though sunny skies are a rarity here, Bottoms has created a skillfully rendered and devilishly unorthodox set of meditations on the "horrors people do."
