The Heavenly Table: A Novel

"To compare The Heavenly Table to Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is too simple. To set it against Sam Peckinpah’s blood-and-thunder Western films is silly because Peckinpah was a product of his historical moment and Donald Ray Pollock seems to float, timeless, somewhere above all base considerations of chronology. What would be apt is to say that Pollock’s ragged-edge Western about the grinding impact of progress on a varied cast of characters who are bewildered by onrushing modernity is what might’ve come from some kind of whiskey-and-Benzedrine-fueled weekend in a mountain cabin, with McCarthy and Peckinpah passing a notebook back and forth, trying to outdo the other with madness, bloodshed and genius. You’ll feel filthy after reading it and it will stick with you in all the best and worst possible ways."