Snake City
A Novel
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Snake City takes the reader into an imaginary kingdom in the waterways of Florida, inhabited by macho gator-killers and feral pigs with murderous tusks for goring two-legged predators. At the center of this hallucinatory fable are Cottonmouth, a viper with a penchant for salty language, and his long-suffering roommate Freddie, a retired Canadian Snowbird who has stupidly purchased swamp acreage from a disreputable land developer to build his dream cabin. When both Freddie and Cottonmouth fall in love with Hilda, a shape-shifting swamp woman, a nasty ménage à trois develops. Into the grittier picture enters a religious zealot, nicknamed "Yessie" by the locals, and his stalker Handsome Harry, a ruthless alpha-gator who wants to make a fast food snack of him. Welcome to Snake City, a devouring adventure in pure evil, blood-curdling terror, and exotic dining.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Freddie, a Canadian "snowbird" or migratory retiree, lives in Florida with his roommate, Cottonmouth, a talking viper with an especially vulgar tongue with whom Freddie occasionally shares "conjoined" dreams. Freddie's paramour, Hilda, is a shape-shifting swamp hag whose loyalty and love extend to all manner of creatures: man, beast, and serpent. The literally lovesick Cottonmouth also lusts after Hilda, and the three of them are soon engaged in a strange love triangle replete with backstabbings and murderous machinations. Observing all this from afar, the angel Gabriel, with whom Freddie communicates via talking into his pillow at night, appears in order to relay his master's displeasure with Freddie's associations (suspecting, of course, that Cottonmouth is in fact Satan himself). Rosenblatt, who has won a Governor General's Award for his poetry, has crafted a kingdom with plenty of surreal strangeness but little of anything else. The novella is constructed in short, sometimes half-page chapters that often feel like incomplete thoughts, with characters existing as little more than thinly sketched collections of absurdities and attitude. Despite the obvious religious commentary at the novella's core, it never manages to find any sort of focus, feeling at times frustratingly random. The final product is, unfortunately, less than the sum of its parts.
