"A collection of, yes, four works by John Fante. Rereading this at the moment. Fante is the man who inspired Bukowski and it'd be hard not to see how great that influence is as Bukowski said: "Fante was my God." Anyway it was that comment by CB that led me to Fante who I prefer as a writer if I had to pick. The crab-shooting passage of The Road to Los Angeles will stay with me for ever and Ask the Dustcorrect, a doomed Los Angeles romance is just fantastic. Robert Towne directed a film version of this a little while back. It's an admirable misfire but he did use the novel previously as a template for the LA of his Chinatown screenplay. The quartet also includes Wait Until Spring, Bandini and Dreams of Bunker Hill."

"Call it Extreme Southern Gothic, New Orleans division. The protagonists of this dark French Quarter novel are knee-deep in murder, torture, sex and cannibalism. The story is unabashedly grim (or as Brite himself puts it, “twisted, horrific”), but Brite’s prose is crystal clear, and his literate tone is sufficiently wry and ironic that it creates a sort of safety zone in which readers not normally drawn to this sort of stuff (myself included) can take refuge while they read. But even arm’s-length readers are apt to find themselves being drawn further and further into the story—seduced in spite of the themselves. Material that would be merely sick, disgusting, and unreadable in the hands of a lesser writer is, with Brite at the controls, surprisingly erotic and captivating. It’s a tour de force, in a literary category all by itself."