Word: scars
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...SCAR LOVER by Harry Crews...
...Flannery O'Connor strapped side by side on a roller coaster, and you have Harry Crews writing Southern gothic. In 1990 he produced the uproarious Body, in which he yoked a family of half-crazy Georgia crackers to the queasy glitz of big-time body building. Now there's Scar Lover, a comic love story filled with death and mutilation...
...gives saccharine | assurances to her lover, Pete Butcher, the angry-young-man hero; Sarah does indeed want a "houseful of little ones." When the ashes cool, the widow Gertrude Leemer, still recovering from a double mastectomy, hefts her husband's skull like a bowling ball and muses, "The final scar makes all of us safe from the world." She credits this insight to the sinister Linga, a giant Rastafarian woman with a face "beautifully scarred" by razor markings and dyed in a vivid multicolored swirl, who is passing out ganja cigarettes from a Sucrets...
...long as Crews is taking big risks, like arranging an appallingly sentimental love scene against a backdrop of psychedelic macabre, Scar Lover works a kind of wacky magic. But his premise, which is roughly that scars have as much to do with healing as with hurt, doesn't carry him very far, and neither do the grotesque accidents that pass for plot...
...disease," she says, "and while it might not help them, it could help their children and grandchildren." She told the villagers that her mother had died of Huntington's and that she might also be stricken. Holding up her right arm, she pointed to a tiny biopsy scar and revealed that she too had contributed a skin sample for analysis. "They really understood that," Nancy says, "and I think they soon realized that we meant them no harm. I became sort of like a family friend, with syringe...