The Gospel Singer

Starred review from March 28, 2022
The brilliant phantasmagorical debut from Crews (Feast of Snakes), originally published in 1968, follows a golden-haired, golden-voiced man known only as “The Gospel Singer” through a series of trials and tribulations. Hailing from the “dead-end” town of Enigma, Ga., he’s now rich and famous, loves luxury cars and high-class hotels, and casually beds any woman he wants. He denies having the power to heal, but the virginal MaryBell Carter, his childhood friend and sweetheart, has a born-again experience when she hears him sing. He then teaches her all sorts of sexual techniques, and she soon controls him sexually whenever he visits Enigma. While the Gospel Singer is away on tour, MaryBell is raped and murders, crimes for which Willalee Bookatee Hull, a Black preacher, is arrested, though everyone from the sheriff to Willalee accepts that he will probably be lynched. The Gospel Singer returns for a revival tour, and a “Freak Fair,” organized by Foot, a small man with a 27-inch foot, is scheduled for the day after. Crews’s poetic and bitterly humorous prose and a minutely observed dialect show how he earned his reputation among the gritty, “Dirty South” writers. This dark satire stands as spiritual heir of Voltaire and Swift.