The Congregation of the Dead: A Novel - Hardcover

Childers, Max

9780941711326: The Congregation of the Dead: A Novel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0941711323 ISBN 13: 9780941711326

Publisher: Wyrick & Co ,U.S., 1996

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From the Back Cover:

The Congregation of the Dead
"Max Childers brings a crisply absurd vision to this story about the adventures of Walter Loomis, a comic hero who is saved from the imminent crash of his professional life when Walter's estranged father-an ex-CIA agent-leaves him a fortune. Unfortunately, Walter must come to terms with the ultimately destructive intersection of his and half-brother's lives.
A blend of Harry Crews and Evelyn Waugh, The Congregation of the Dead is an energetic sermon about the unreliability of material wealth, family tradition, and higher education.
No one gets more dramatic mileage out of human folly and mismanaged fireworks than Max Childers."
"In his past novels, Max Childers has set his sardonic gaze on Elvis and televangelism, hallmarks of the news, mildewed South, to be sure. In The Congregation of the Dead, Childers paints on a smaller canvas. The town is Helmsville, North Carolina, but it's a world that's just as demented and barbaric as a Walmart on the busiest shopping day of the year. It's Absolom, Absolom as imagined by John Kennedy Toole, a stage filled with dunces, misanthropes, and chiselers, all spiced with Childers' keen and delightfully wicked insights into the woeful human condition."
Robin Hemley
_______________________________________________________________Praise for Max Childers' other novels
"Max Childers' first novel is a very intelligent, very sour satire....a good, sharp dose of literary vinegar."
Martin Kirby, The New York Times Book Review
"Mr. Childers has concocted a true burgoo, bubbling with action and boiling over with humor that's slapstick, side splitting and downright satisfying."
Elizabeth Beattie, The Atlanta Journal and Constitution

From the Inside Flap:

The Congregation of the DeadMax Childers In his first two novels, Things Undone and Alpha Omega, Max Childers turned over the rock of Southern rural life and set loose a variety of insects and vermin-in the guise of yuppie lawyers, hypocritical evangelists, a perverted judge and an Elvis imitator. In this novel, Childers returns to the setting of Things Undone. The Congregation of the Dead is a novel that explores the connections between the past and present, family and the individual, and fathers and sons. Walter Looms is a failed writer whose mysterious and long-unseen father leaves a fortune, as well as a brother, and an array of problems, some of which are comic and some which aren't. The Congregation of the Dead is about things we claim to cherish; things that can change us in unanticipated and ominous ways.Back Cover CopyMax Childers is an Associate Professor of English at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, SC. He was a Walter E. Dawkin Fellow at the 1990 Sewanee Writer's Conference and has won a fellowship in fiction writing from the North Carolina Arts and Science Council. Childers lives in Lowell, NC, with his wife Jean and their two sons. He is the author of two previous novels, Things Undone and Alpha Omega.

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