The Texas Observer, May 8th, 2003
Eden
Grove Press
268 pages, $23.
If Olympia Vernon were a painter instead of a writer her nightmare landscapes--part Hieronymous Bosch, part Francis Bacon--would swarm with animal, vegetable, and human life, often distorted, and placed against desolate backdrops daubed with reds, greens, and ochres. (Imagine a dead bird, a breastless woman, a lizard, magnolias, a pig.) Through her use of such imagery the author conveys a sense of menace and estrangement.
In this, Vernon's first novel, the township of Eden, Mississippi, placed close to the Louisiana border, serves as her canvas. Her charact...
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