In an ultimate, though not obvious way, Hannah's stories [in Airships] are fused together thematically; the tactic is reminiscent of Faulkner's Go Down Moses. Individually, they are beautifully built, but the construction work is so organic that he didn't have to leave the braces showing…. More writers have been smuggled out of the South than cartons of cigarettes, and Barry Hannah is one of the best…. His feel for [the short story] form is amazingly sound—perhaps m...

In the review below, Coates remarks on Never Die.

Barry Hannah's Ray … is a song. Sharp and snappy snatches for the most part, above the electrics, cool and hot, of being alive…. It's announced to be a novel, and there is a thread of a story to cling to as necessary, though the southern milieu—slice-of-Americana-now—is just as handy. Mostly it's the recollections and musings—sorrows and ecstacies, dreams and encounters—of a bright, horny, 33-year-old Alabama doctor whose first two names are Ray...

In the following review, Kennedy remarks favorably on Boomerang.

In the following excerpt from a review of Bats out of Hell, Blythe remarks on Hannah's characters and admiration for Jimi Hendrix.

The sometimes third-person hero who gives the title to [Ray], usually told by him in first person, is an alcoholic medical doctor and veteran jet fighter pilot alive and troublemaking right now. He flew from a carrier over Vietnam from 1967 to 1969, and now he has children, his second marriage has gone to hell, he teaches American civilization at the local college, has enjoyed love and lust with Sister Hooch, who has been shot dead by a religious fanatic. Ray steals a Learjet and it crashes, and he survives...

[Barry Hannah's] first novel, "Geronimo Rex," was published last year to general, if tempered, praise; it is a crazy and messy piece of work which unravels in the end, but it has admirable energy, exuberant humor and a genuine feel for what it is like to grow up in the contemporary South. But "Nightwatchmen" is another matter altogether; it is simply a mess. What we have here is dimestore philosophizing, uncertain satire and rambling story-telling. "Nightwatchmen&#x...

Of all the rich array of error in a book reviewer's repertoire of philistinism, the worst may be that of falling in love with an author's first novel, and then despising his second because it is not an exact copy of the first. Well, let error rain down. I thought, and so reported, that Barry Hannah's first novel Geronimo Rex was rousing work; mainly because of the author's joyous gift for throwing language around. And I think that Hannah's second novel, Nightwatchmen, is a...

In "Ray," Barry Hannah's startling new novel, set in the American South, we have come a long way from the hanging moss and stately columns of the antebellum era. In "Ray," we have come by way of Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Tennessee Williams, Walker Percy, and Harry Crews, to an image of the South that perhaps is best captured by Mr. Hannah's description of the Hooches' home in Tuscaloosa, Ala. "The others of the street are not of their homes a...

In the following review, Raksin distinguishes the representation of violence in Hannah's works from that of such authors as Bret Easton Ellis.

In recent weeks—somewhat to our suprise—we have run three front-page reviews of fiction by young American writers. Mary Gordon's "Final Payments" is her first novel; John Irving's "The World According to Garp" is his fourth; Barry Hannah's "Airships" is his first collection of stories, though he has already published two novels…. These young writers deserve praise: they are strong and original and clearly in touch with life,...

Biloxi, Vicksburg, Mobile, Newark, Santa Fe, Richmond, Atlanta, Tuscaloosa: The names all appear in Barry Hannah's striking book of short stories ["Airships"] and the places are mostly Southern. Mr. Hannah's territory is "the new American South," and the new economy of the South appears in one story as something like a frame of mind…. (p. 1) But Barry Hannah is not really a regional writer, except perhaps in the sense that "Dubliners" is a regio...

In its peculiar way—and its way is endlessly peculiar—Ray is a novel of the South…. [Barry Hannah's world] has the lyricism and silliness-with-a-straight-face of a Steinberg cartoon. Despite the background of violence and disorder—the sirens and the asylum are near—its immediate subject is quaintly untroubled, just as Steinberg's multicolored, melodramatic smears of mauve and blue and red coexist with simpler line-drawing….

In following review of Never Die, Kaye faults Hannah for not fully developing his characters.

"Geronimo Rex" is a stunning piece of entertainment, almost a totally successful book…. Hannah is one of those young writers who is brilliantly drunk with words and could at gunpoint write a life story of a telephone pole. He strains for the bon mot and comes up with half a dozen…. "Geronimo Rex" is vulgar, sexual, ribald and wildly comic. The writing is intricate enough to make it hard to believe that it's really a first novel. The hero, Harriman Monroe, is ...

In the excerpt below, the critic comments briefly on Never Die.

What kind of story can be told by a jet fighter pilot who fought—who fights—in the Civil War? The answer is a damn fine one. [In Ray] Barry Hannah very nearly merges reader and experience, greatly diminishing the distance that has always separated the two. In this novel, there are no transitions of time or space, but what emerges is a narrative that has the kind of unity and coherence that we associate with the best fiction. Every action, incident and perception echoes every other…. Thi...

Barry Hannah, who wrote the extravagantly praised Airships, is a master of the short form. Yet [Ray] often reads like a collection of sketches. It is diffuse—characters are introduced once and forgotten, incidents go nowhere—and this failure of continuity deprives the book of the cumulative power it should have. Ray is laconic, mean, raunchy, and very funny, but not as moving as it means to be. (p. 72) Ronald Nevans, "Fiction: 'Ray'," in Saturday Review...