Crum: The Novel Book

The 1998 appearance of this novel stirred deep feelings, and this second edition will no doubt do the same. Maynard, a native of Crum in Wayne County, West Virginia, spins a sometimes shocking, often outrageous, always irreverent tale of a young man’s rebellion against the people and the place that have surrounded his life. Part Huckleberry Finn and part The Red and the Black, the story is ultimately not about the town of Crum, but about the need to reject the comfort and familiarity of home and find a place in the larger world. Crum is a touching and humorous look at small-town life, and at the peculiar rituals of male adolescence. Since its highly successful first publication, this novel has become something of an underground classic, with used copies now scarce and costly. Maynard adds a brief epilogue to this new edition, and West Virginia writer Meredith Sue Willis provides an introduction. Crum shot to number eight on the Doubleday Best Seller list within its first month of publication, despite its ban by Maynard’s home state of West Virginia. He has since published a sequel to Crum titled Screaming with the Cannibals.

Publishers Weekly

With its preoccupation with adolescent sex, and a plethora of obscene and scatological language, silly pranks and fisticuffs, this inaugural novel in the Washington Square Press original fiction line will only appeal to readers with sophomoric tastes. Maynard, 51, sets his first effort, a 1950s coming-of-age story, in his native Crum, W. Va., ``located deep in the bowels of the Appalachians, on the bank of the Tug River, the urinary tract of the mountains.'' The nameless narrator repetitiously cites his desire to leave this mining town, which was ``a zero. A blank. Nothing''rife with poverty and ignorance and bereft of indoor toilets. ``We would try anything to relieve the monotony of living in Crum,'' he says, and the novel details his antics during his final year in the dump, which he flees after completing high school. He and his buddies dynamite outhouses, rob delivery trucks, expose themselves, witness pig butcherings and pick fights with Kentucky teens. There is much potential material here in the plight of the narrator, a lonely orphan who lives in a shed tacked onto the back of a cousin's shack. But Maynard's characters are inscrutable to themselves (``Don't ask me why I did it, I just did,'' says the hero when he insults a friend) and, ultimately, to the reader. (June)