His fiction is fast, mean, extraordinarily violent, and often horrifyingly funny, altogether an unsettling combination.
His first novel, The Gospel Singer (1968), features a golden boy, with voice to match, from Enigma, Georgia (population 600), to which he returns most reluctantly, accompanied by his business manager and spiritual counselor, Didymus, and followed by a traveling Freak Fair, directed by Foot, one of whose feet is twenty-seven inches long. Prior to the Gospel Singer's arrival, his long-time sweetheart, MaryBell Carter, voluptuous virgin and doer of good works, has been murdered and--the white townspeople believe--raped by a local black man, Willalee Bookatee Hull, who anticipates (quite accurately) that he will be lynched.
The Gospel Singer is, as the dust jacket says, in public an angel and in private a satyr, on which facts the desultory plot turns. That his arrival in Enigma breaks a two-month drought is consistent with his local reputation--he is their savior; he gives meaning and purpose and excitement to claustrophobic, spiritually depleted, poverty-stricken lives. It is the belief of Didymus, who murdered his predecessor, that suffering is God's greatest gift to man; certainly very few of the characters escape it. After a day described as one long sustained shock, the Gospel Singer is finally moved to tell the truth at the widely advertised giant tent show: that he could not be what they have said he is, that he hates those who demand that he bless them, and that MaryBell Carter was the biggest whore who ever walked in Enigma.
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