In a run-down building in the last stages of disrepair and decay a group of misfits, freaks, and thugs live out their ill-sorted lives in a Black comedy portrait of urban blight

Reviews

Packed with nervous energy, glittering with satiric irony, this brilliant, surrealistic novel turns an apartment building into the epitome of urban depravity and the decline of civilization. The Building is a netherworld of dope dealers, evangelists, excrement artists, fetishists and whores. Among its occupants: a lunatic who kidnaps and carries on his shoulders a dwarf chained by the philosophy professor who owns him; a painter whose only subject is madonnas, the models for whom he locks in his freezing studio; a black man who awakens every morning fearing that he's turned white; a womanbut does she live in the Building?who walks naked down Eastern Parkway carrying her books and levis, plaid shirt and cowboy hat; a paraplegic raped by pushers named MasterCharge and Visa. Each of these and scores more saunter trouble-bent through the Building, whose floors run with urine, whose roof leaks because the gypsies who sold it to the owner stole the wrong roof and put it on the wrong buiding. The city takes over, fixes the furnace, plasters the walls, mends the doors, but cannot stem the metastasizing grafitti: slowly, inexorably, the seeds of riot sprout. The end is conflagration, bringing the book, which has burned brightly all along, to the conclusion ordained by its author's powerful, tragi-comedic vision. January 13
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Glynn manages to introduce 29 characters in the first few pages of this brooding novel. You can make that 30 if you count the Building, always referred to in the upper case. The first chapters spin out in a stream of consciousness that takes you right into the damaged minds of Glynn's injured, throw-away people. The once-splendid Building, now decrepit and crumbling, stands in a Brooklyn slum. Its impoverished owner schemes to burn it down, while the derelict and the near-derelict swarm through it like roaches. Glynn paints an apocalyptic tableau in dark colors, his surrealistic style so rich in imagery and fantasy that it is almost baroque. A stylistically adventurous work, for collections of contemporary fiction. Vicky Hay, Hay Writing & Editing, Phoenix, Ariz.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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