Pitiful Criminals

by Greg Bottoms, David Powell (Illustrator)

Overview

In Pitiful Criminals, Greg Bottoms offers thirteen genre–bending chapters from his past that take a close look at the lives of small–time criminals driven, often by confusion and desperation, to deeds that range from the absurd to the heinous. We meet the author's schizophrenic arsonist brother, a depressed pot grower, a damaged ex–dealer who barely escaped a violent burglary, a born–again teenage shooter, and other alienated Americans pushed to extremes by psychology and circumstance. Forceful, poetic, unique, and utterly uncompromising, it is an unforgettable tour of the dark side of the human condition.

Greg Bottoms's innovative fiction and creative nonfiction have focused on the American South, the effects of violence on individual lives, criminal behavior, mental illness, ecstatic and spiritual experience, and class in America. He blends explicitly autobiographical and biographical content with artful storytelling, a cultural journalist's observations, and a philosopher's deep inquiry into the strange ways we live now. This is postmodern crime fiction at its gritty and original best.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781619023864
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	07/21/2014
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	204
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Greg Bottoms is an essayist, story writer, and critic. He is the author of a memoir, Angelhead: My Brother's Descent into Madness, two books of narrative essays about American self–taught religious artists, The Colorful Apocalypse: Journeys in Outsider Art and Spiritual American Trash: Portraits from the Margins of Art and Faith, and three genre–blurring collections of autobiographical short prose, Sentimental, Heartbroken Rednecks, Fight Scenes, and Swallowing the Past. He is a Professor of English at the University of Vermont, where he teaches creative writing.

Table of Contents

A Message from Prison 15

The Minister's Handyman 31

The Shooter 51

Scarface 73

The Truce 93

Attempted Murder Mystery 99

Half of What I Thought I Knew (or, Criminals Before Their Crimes) 115

The Man Who Found Two Bodies 127

Easy Roller 143

A Couple of Ways to Kill Yourself 159

Rabbit Dog Gun 169

Hit and Run 179

A New Trial 195

Editorial Reviews

05/26/2014
Again deriving prose from his troubled life, Bottoms offers 13 short slices of factually based crime fiction. He opens and closes with Michael, his older brother, a paranoid schizophrenic portrayed in harrowingly painful detail in Bottoms’s 2005 memoir, Angelhead: My Brother’s Descent into Madness. Now, emerging from 15 years in a psychiatric treatment facility for setting the family home ablaze, Michael reaches out for contact, but Bottoms feels forced to “cut him loose” for his own sanity’s sake. Other entries, most of them set in suburban Virginia, include “The Minister’s Handyman,” in which a young woman is stalked, raped, and murdered by a crazed neighbor, who then buries her in her own garden; “The Shooter,” about a gun-crazed high schooler; “Scarface,” about a drug-dealing pothead with deadly hubris; “Attempted Murder Mystery,” about the author’s tribulations as a kindhearted landlord; and “The Man Who Found Two Bodies,” about the discovery of several young boys’ bodies in the woods. Graphically fortified with crude line drawings by W. David Powell, the book depicts these atrocious events with economy, precisely delivering mood and motive in the span of a page or two. Though sunny skies are a rarity here, Bottoms has created a skillfully rendered and devilishly unorthodox set of meditations on the “horrors people do.” Agent: Jenny Bent, Bent Agency. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Pitiful Criminals

"By turns evocatively understated and rapturously outrageous, Pitiful Criminals is a collision of memory and fiction that compassionately reminds us what makes us human, what makes us stupid, what makes us genuinely abhorrent, and why we are sometimes still worth loving nevertheless." —John D'Agata, author of About a Mountain and Lifespan of a Fact

From the Publisher

06/01/2014
Bottoms famously slides along the line between fact and fiction, so it's no surprise to see this series of 13 vignettes, reputedly drawn from his past, labeled crime fiction. VERDICT From the consequences of his brother's schizophrenia to a pastor who suspects murder, these tales are told in a laconic voice that only amplifies their power. With black-and-white line drawings throughout; highly recommended for uncommon readers.

Library Journal