Citations
In stories and novels set mainly in the South, McManus presents damaged outsiders hanging by a thread, without judgment. His particular lyricism joins with dangerous territory to produce a spectacular "haunted eccentricity." His work begins and ends in jeopardy, the kind that dismantles a soul. And that the afterimage is one of beauty is part of his surpassing ability, as is the dark humor that lands with a jolt.
McManus has the desire and the ability to push his language toward a similar extreme and to transform it radically, as Cormac McCarthy and, before him, William Faulkner have done. Fierceness, too: the best of McManus's stories have some of the ferocity that Flannery O'Connor brought to her vision of her material. Together with these qualities is this writer's sensitivity to place. John McManus comes from the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, but that is only one of the settings he faithfully renders. He is equally authoritative when writing about the western desert of the Pacific northwest or a number of northeastern urban environments. That sense of place is a trait of the southern writer, no matter where it is exercised.
Fox Tooth Heart
McManus burrows deep under the skins of his rough, cast-out characters and emerges with stories that are bold and ingenious.
Wildly inventive short stories... McManus delves into the minds of his characters, allowing readers to experience their anxieties, delusions, fantasies, and fears.
Achingly visceral... a masterpiece.
John McManus writes like the love child of Denis Johnson and Joy Williams.... For those wearied by predictable fiction, Fox Tooth Heart is manna from someplace more interesting and sorrowful than heaven.
This is McManus's genius: depravity, tender and effortless.
Reading a McManus story isn't entirely unlike doing a popper of amyl nitrite, with qualifications: a lingering sense of discomfort that is disturbing.... Mind-altering effect also common.
Fox Tooth Heart will impress readers.... McManus is a terrific writer.
Bitter Milk
A southern gothic novel for the twenty-first century.... The writing is powerful and original, but a lot like a train wreck: you don't want to look at it, but you can't help yourself.
Bold in conception and shrewdly deployed, the voice that first-time novelist John McManus has invented for Bitter Milk is inspired.... Read Bitter Milk and you'll find yourself often catching your breath in anticipation.... Bitter Milk is an outstanding novel.
Bitter Milk will sting you like a blast of rock salt packed into a sawed-off 20-gauge.... Loren's eccentricities are rich enough to make him nearly as compelling as Benjy in The Sound and the Fury.
The narrative moves toward a kind of liberation.... The result is a densely atmospheric, propulsive tale.
Born on a Train
John McManus's Born on a Train delivers a dozen pitch-perfect tales... all packed with yearning, dark humor, and a gorgeous poetry of love and loss.
This is a shadow world, the "dark" side of America, and like a shadow you can't get rid of it.
The stories in John McManus's Born on a Train are powered by radiant prose.
John McManus' nervewracking prose has great pitch and daring, and "Eastbound" has to be one of the best, most mournful end-of-the-road stories ever written. He's a wildly talented writer.
McManus's sensibility is that of a Tennessee Williams writing about impoverished hillbillies instead of fading Southern gentlefolk.
Stop Breakin Down
A phenomenal talent blazing up suddenly on the horizon... precise, brilliant language that evokes without ever having to explain... His transcendent vision gives us devastating glimpses... He may be in Denis Johnson and Thom Jones territory, but the arresting music he makes there is all his own.
Here is rage on the page.... It's a whole environment, with a new food chain, and yes, I want to know about it.
McManus straps his characters into a screaming, circular drop toward nothingness in what seems like one long, breathless take.
John McManus's short stories are the literary equivalent of drive-by shootings.... McManus is either going to become the next Celine or self-destruct before he turns 30.