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CRUDDY: An Illustrated Novel
by: Lynda Barry

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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780684838465
ISBN: 068483846X
Label: Simon & Schuster
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 320
Publication Date: October 10, 2000
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Sales Rank: 32547
Studio: Simon & Schuster

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Editorial Review:

Product Description:
On a September night in 1971, a few days after getting busted for dropping acid, a sixteen-year-old curls up in the corner of her ratty bedroom and begins to write.

Now the truth can finally be revealed about the mysterious day long ago when the authorities found a child, calmly walking in the boiling desert, covered with blood.

The girl is Roberta Rohbeson, and her rant against a world bounded by 'the cruddy top bedroom of a cruddy rental house on a very cruddy mud road' soon becomes a detailed account of another story, one that she has kept silent since she was eleven.

Darkly funny and resonant with humanity, Cruddy, masterfully intertwines Roberta's stories -- part Easy Rider and part bipolar Wizard of Oz. These stories, the backbone of Roberta's short life, include a one-way trip across America fueled by revenge and greed and a vivid cast of characters, starring Roberta's dangerous father, the owners of the Knocking Hammer Bar-cum-slaughterhouse, and runaway adolescents. With a teenager's eye for freakish detail and a nervous ability to make the most horrible scenes seem hilarious, Cruddy is a stunning achievement.

Amazon.com:
Lynda Barry's illustrated novel Cruddy has not one but three equally alarming openings. The first is a suicide note: 'Dear Anyone Who Finds This, Do not blame the drugs.' The next is a description of the lurid crucifix that hangs over the narrator's bed: 'Some nights looking at him scares me so bad I can hardly move and I start doing a prayer for protection. But when the thing that is scaring you is already Jesus, who are you supposed to pray to?' The third is worthy of a nightmare fairytale, beginning 'Once upon a cruddy time on a cruddy street on the side of a cruddy hill in the cruddiest part of a crudded-out town in a cruddy state, country, world, solar system, universe...'

She's not exaggerating. It's 1971, and 16-year-old Roberta Rohbeson lives in what looks very much like hell. It's five years after the Lucky Chief Motel Massacre, after which Roberta was found wandering the desert, covered with blood and clutching her dog, Cookie, who suffers from 'incurable skin problems.' Even now, Roberta still won't talk about what happened. She lives with her mother and sister on the aforementioned cruddy street, hides in the weeds during her lunch period, and eventually befriends some suicidal misfits like herself. The novel intercuts their chemically enhanced adventures with scenes from a gore-filled road trip taken five years before. Hint No. 1: Roberta's father used to run a slaughterhouse. Hint No. 2: The maps inside the front covers have keys that read 'Dead People We Left Behind' and 'Places There Were Blood.'

Barry came to fame as a cartoonist, and though the humor in her strip Ernie Pook's Comeek is dark, nothing in it could prepare her fans for the sheer horror of Cruddy. The novel is funny, sort of, as long as you think naming a knife Little Debbie is funny, or lines like 'A man who has been dead for a week in a hot trailer looks more like a man than you would first expect.' What's more, it's compulsively, almost harrowingly, readable, written with the kind of velocity that makes you keep turning pages even when you don't want to. Despite the hallucinogenic quality of the violence around her, Roberta is never anything less than real, and her story will strike chords in anyone whose childhood was marked by ugliness and fear. Cruddy may be a bad acid trip, but if you can stomach the ride, it's a very good book. --Mary Park

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- For those with a dark and twisted sense of humor
Cruddy is a little black diamond of a book that will resonate with those who possess an extremely dark sense of humor. While definitely not for the faint-hearted, Cruddy has vividly drawn characters and a complicated but satisfying narrative structure which alternates between 16-year-old Roberta's drug escapades in the present and the events that occurred five years earlier when authorities found her wandering the desert, covered in blood and unable to speak. Although the back-and-forth structure may at first be confusing, savvy readers will quickly orient themselves. The plot is compelling, but it is Roberta's voice and the way she reveals the horrifying details of her life with wry detachment that make this a great read. Don't bother with this unless you can chuckle at the more gruesome parts of humanity.

Rating:

- Sticky
This book sticks to the mind, keeping the images and characters lingering for weeks after reading the book.

Rating:

- Cruddy dreams come with Cruddy
Unless you are a fan of horror movies, or prepared for dreadful dreams, you should not start reading Linda Berry's first and illustrated novel, Cruddy. Cruddy is a rich, dark, and raw story, with a strange sense of humor, full of violence and gross details, and no consideration for sensitive readers. Regardless of the reading interests, once started reading the novel, it becomes difficult to put it down. From the beginning, Roberta Rohbeson, the novel's sixteen year-old narrator and her story, hunt the readers day and night, even while asleep. Roberta, Berry's amazing handicraft, is a powerful storyteller. This book is her memoir, in which she tells two twisted stories, the story of a year-long horror-adventure killing spree treasure hunt she was tricked, or more accurately, forced to go with her father when she was eleven, which she has never told it before, and the story of her storytelling to a few wasted teenagers ... Read More

Rating:

- Deliciously morbid!
"Cruddy" is seriously noir stuff, but filtered through what may be the blackest sense of humor I have ever encountered. This book is not for everyone, but if it does happen to be for you, then you are in for a seriously major trip.

Ms. Barry's essentially outlandish premises (a daughter named Clyde?!), proprietary verbal inventions and astute wackiness remind me of Vonnegut, although her voice is much too unique to be derivative. There is more than a smattering of early John Waters-type trailer trash, and she leaves no doubt that she is right down there in the trenches with her characters (one hopes only temporarily!).

This author projects the most curious sense of indeterminate place, regardless of whether it is day or night (it seems like night much of the time, even if it's not). She does the same with time, essentially presenting two stories simultaneously, one of them actually a type of flashback. ... Read More

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