Scar Lover [Hardcover]

Although this demented and darkly humorous tale is billed as Crews's ( Body ) "most mainstream" novel, rest assured he hasn't gotten there quite yet. Acerbic college-dropout Pete Butcher loathes himself for accidentally causing his little brother brain damage with a claw hammer, and he is haunted by the sight of the dual dents on the child's forehead. On his way to a Jacksonville, Fla., warehouse--where he works with a Rastafarian whose wife repeatedly brands him to commemorate each year they are together--Pete encounters Sarah Leemer, a handsome, mesmerizing young woman with a golfball-like lump in her breast. Against his better judgment, he and Sarah become lovers and he is welcomed into her family, which includes a mentally unhinged mother who has just had a radical mastectomy and a father who complains of a bad heart "the size of a watermelon." The suffering foursome have just achieved an uneasy peace when tragedy strikes them anew, launching its survivors into a gruesome, comical, grimly poetic night of graphic death and Rasta remedies. Pete's sudden responsibility to the Leemers serves to expiate his guilt over his brother; Crews admirably sustains his theme of disfigurement and healing, and if the finale is slightly ambiguous it still bears its author's trademark perverse twist. Author tour.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

When Pete Butcher ends up in Jacksonville, Florida, he carries with him emotional scars from a devastated family life that cause him to recoil from the strangers he meets daily. Pete just wants to be left alone, but he has landed himself in the middle of a carnival of characters, especially Sarah Leamer, who has staked a claim to Pete. Pete is thus reluctantly drawn into her family's own tragic affairs. Through Sarah, Pete confronts life, death, and, ultimately, his own greatest scar. In the meantime, Pete befriends Burnt George, a co-worker and Rastafarian who carries his own horseshoe-shaped scars seared into his back. Crews darkly comic tale gives a disturbingly accurate portrayal of characters from the rural South, each fiercely shaped by sweat, grit, and cruel hardship. Although the plot becomes very strained at points, Scar Lover will not disappoint Crews's fans. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/15/91.
-Brack Stovall, Carrollton P.L., Tex.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The latest novel by this former master of true grit southern fiction smartly steers away from the slapstick antics that so marred his last (Body, 1990). Even so, Crews still can't re-create the redneck eloquence of his early work. All the losers and weirdos who people this off-kilter book bear some kind of scar, literal or metaphoric. Pete Butcher, boxcar worker and former Marine, carries the heaviest burden--three years earlier he accidentally slammed his four-year-old brother in the forehead with a hammer, turning the bright and affectionate boy into a slobbering vegetable. Shortly thereafter, his parents die in a flaming car wreck, his brother is institutionalized, and the rest of Pete's family rejects him. This Georgia boy quits the University of Florida after four days and finds himself busting his hump in Jacksonville, trying to forget the past. Only no one will let him. Not his co-worker George, a bulking Rastafarian from Jamaica whose back is branded annually by his woman, Linga, a voodoo goddess with an elaborate design of scars on her beautiful mulatto face. When the family across the street from Pete's boardinghouse learns his story from a busybody neighbor, they too join the effort to redeem Pete, who feels ``cursed before man and God.'' The Leemers themselves are also part of the ``walking wounded''--mother Gertrude has just had a radical mastectomy; father Henry is a hard- working, overly cautious fellow; and daughter Sarah, who captures Pete's heart, fears the lump in her breast may be a legacy from her mother. After Henry dies from a heart attack, things take a turn for the bizarre, sucking Pete into a wild plot of corpse-snatching, cremation, and Rasta hocus-pocus. Only the strong and patient Sarah (``a woman to be reckoned with'') can pull Pete from this ``quagmire of craziness,'' and also reunite his family. A roomful of farting corpses indicates the depths to which Crews sinks here for comic relief. From sin to redemption, this highly improbable tale of hope and affirmation just doesn't cut it- -it's as belabored as the awkward title. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Scarred by the past and by the tragic accident that destroyed his family, Pete Butcher finds salvation from his aimless, isolated, and hopeless life through the determined love of his next-door neighbor, Sarah Leamer. 15,000 first printing. Tour.