Harry Crews, whose novels out-Gothic Southern Gothic by conjuring a world of hard-drinking, punch-throwing, knife-fighting, snake-oil-selling characters whose myriad physical, mental, social and sexual deviations render them entirely normal and eminently sympathetic, died on Wednesday at his home in Gainseville, Fla. He was 76.
The cause was complication of neuropathy, said his ex-wife, Sally Crews.
A Georgia Rabelais, Mr. Crews was renowned for his darkly comic, bitingly satirical, freakishly populated and almost preternaturally violent novels. Though his books captivated many reviewers (they bewildered others and repelled still others), they attracted a cadre of readers so fiercely devoted that the phrase “cult following” seems inadequate to describe their level of ardor.
Mr. Crews came to wide notice with the publication of his first novel, “The Gospel Singer,” in 1968. The book, about a traveling evangelist who fetches up in the fictional town of Enigma, Ga., and meets a dire fate, features characters of the sort that would people Mr. Crews’s dozen later novels: sideshow freaks and an escaped lunatic.
A fuller obituary will appear soon.
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