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Original Essays | June 27, 2009

All posts by Fran Cannon Slayton On Wakes and Rum (and Coke)

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1 Burnside Literature- A to Z


The End of Alice

by A. M. Homes

The End of Alice Cover

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

The End of Alice sneaks us in the back doors of our upright suburban neighborhoods to reveal the impulses that even in our frank, outspoken times we don't talk about. This is a tale told by a pedophile in his twenty-third year in a maximum security prison. He is intelligent; he is witty; he is profoundly dangerous. Beyond the reality of his stark cell and the violent perversion of the other inmates lies his imagination, which he turns to his past, to an "accident" with a little girl named Alice, and now to the erotic life of a nineteen-year-old suburban co-ed who draws him into a flirtatious epistolary exchange. At home on summer break from college, she writes to the prisoner about her taste for young boys, her lust for one twelve-year-old in particular. She is inspired by the convict's crimes; he is excited by her peculiar obsession. Into the veneer of middle-class convention — the tennis lessons, baby-sitting, and family dinners — she casts her line for the boy. He bites. As her reports of their strange affair progress, the prisoner's memory unravels, revealing the appalling circumstances of his captivity, his deadly and lingering infatuation with Alice. The intertwined fixations of these unlikely correspondents give The End of Alice its haunting, unsettling power. A. M. Homes, whom the New York Times Book Review calls "exhilaratingly perverse," lures us into the lives of characters simultaneously repellent and seductive.

Review:

"Like recent novels by Susannah Moore and Joyce Carol Oates, Homes's latest (after her A Country of Mothers) is a literary serial-killer novel, by turns sensational and clever, smutty and powerful." Publishers Weekly

Review:

"Deliberately shocking and confrontational, Homes's purpose seems to be to force the reader into a kind of Dostoevskian identification with the blackest and most perverse elements of human nature." Library Journal

Synopsis:

When an imprisoned pedophile is drawn into an erotically charged correspondence with a 19-year-old suburban co-ed, the two reveal--and revel in--their obsessive desires. Part romance, part horror story, "The End Of Alice" is at once unnerving, repellent, and seductive.

Product Details

ISBN:
9780684827100
Author:
Homes, A. M.
Publisher:
Scribner Book Company
Location:
New York :
Subject:
General
Subject:
Fiction
Subject:
Prisoners
Subject:
Murderers
Subject:
Child molesters -- Fiction.
Subject:
General Fiction
Subject:
General Fiction
Subject:
Psychological fiction
Copyright:
Edition Description:
B102
Publication Date:
February 1997
Binding:
Paperback
Grade Level:
General/trade
Language:
English
Illustrations:
Yes
Pages:
272
Dimensions:
8.18x5.22x.57 in. .49 lbs.

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