#27

I have a sense of humor but I tend to keep my amusement to myself. I don't typically laugh with abandon. But Wells Tower had me rolling a couple times, great gouts of guffaws until tears ran down my cheeks. I haven't laughed like that since I read George Saunders for the first time. Wells Tower is a lot like a more sedate and staid George Saunders, kind of like if George Saunders wrote more like Bobbie Ann Mason.

I might have laughed out loud several times reading Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, but that doesn't mean these stories are light. They are, in fact, quite dark, and the subject matter is often hard as anything cooked up in Faulkner's pickled and Satanic imagination. This is a book of high quality.