Crazy Eddie

A book of short stories including Crazy Eddie about a young criminal who started his a career in the 1950s and Brides of Christ about the Catholic School experiences of a young boy. Wolf is a portrait of a gangster who lived in the 1920s. Prologue: Popular pulp fiction, trash, even when bleak evades and denies reality, partly to avoid the stain and stigma of infuriation and skepticism. Instead of telling a story of desperate survival and perhaps even triumph of a kind, it wallows in a fantasy of benign rescue. It makes us eager collaborators in our own emasculation and devitalization. We're waiting for superman to fly in or our ships to come in, or the Fairytale Prince to gallop in on his white charger, or the king's golden-haired daughter to come down from her tower, or the homicidal idiot locked-up in the cellar next-door to abscond to save us in the nick-of-time; same as Kemo Sabe; or the cavalry; or Hani Pasha; or Abel Magwitch; or the all-seeing eye in the sky, which is not god, but now-and-again pretends to be. ... To be plucked from jeopardy or obscurity or poverty or disgrace by a magic mentor or an astonishing savior or a quirk of fate.