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Lord of the Barnyard - Publisher: Grove
- Year: 1999
- Pages: 432
I have reviewed the late Tristan Egolf’s Lord of the Barnyard in 2006, though I’ve read it several times (and could have sworn I’d reviewed it twice…) since my friend first thrust it into my hands in high school and said, with unlikely solemnity, “You have to read this.”
Doing multiple reviews about the same book is difficult, especially if one’s opinions haven’t drastically changed since the last iteration; this review of Lord of the Barnyard doesn’t see yours truly suddenly deciding that Egolf is blasé or the book is suddenly overwrought. In fact, I remain more convinced than ever that it’s one of the best novels I’ve ever read. There is a common item of praise and a common complaint from reviewers, and the two are really one and the same:
- Praise: the book is “frenzied” and “wonderfully strange” (Literary Review); “always intense” (De Morgan; a “manic, epic [wild ride]” (Publisher’s Weekly).
- Criticism: the book is “prone to stretches of excess” (Publisher’s Weekly); a “rough beast, both interesting and exciting without quite managing to be good” (NY Times); “a form of shotgun writing” (Salon )
