The Alphabet Man - Reviews

"In this very dark, very daring first novel by Richard Grossman, words are the only palpable reality. The dense texture of this novel is immediately compelling - words are enlarged and mutilated, they are strewn across pages, they are thrown together in mad, uncommon, even ungodly combinations."

-Review of Contemporary Fiction

"One of the best novels of any year, it is brilliantly structured to match the painfully coherent structure of Franklin's schizophrenic consciousness; it is also stylistically impeccable, managing to sustain its multiplicity of voices flawlessly."

-Booklist

"The Alphabet Man is a dark joke, unsparing and uncommonly harrowing. It is also a novel with a split personality to match its protagonist's: part brilliant narrative, part lexical and typographical mutant."

-Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Dark humor enlivens what is essentially an absurdist, postmodern fairy tale probing the psyche of a serial killer."

-Publisher's Weekly

"Richard Grossman writes the perfect novel for our times."

-Jerome Klinkowitz

"Clyde Wayne Franklin.... is the most horrifyingly beautiful and monstrously lyrical narrator to stalk the pages of American fiction since Nobakov's Humbert Humbert."

-Larry McCaffery