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by: Lynda Barry  List Price: $11.99 Amazon.com's Price: $9.59 You Save: $2.40 (20%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54 Format: Kindle Book Label: Simon & Schuster Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 320 Publication Date: January 07, 2004 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Release Date: January 07, 2004 Studio: Simon & Schuster Related Items: Browse for similar items by category: Click to Display Editorial Review: Product Description: Roberta Rohbeson, 1971. Her overblown, drug-induced teenage rant against the world soon becomes a detailed account of another story. It is a story about which Roberta has kept silent for five years. Roberta Rohbeson, 1967. The world of Roberta, age eleven, is terrifyingly unbounded, a violent, hallucinatory, sometimes funny, more often horrific year of killings, betrayals, arson, and a sinister set of butcher knives, each with its own name. Welcome to Cruddy, Lynda Barry's masterful tale of the two intertwined narratives set five years -- an eternity -- apart, which form the backbone of Roberta's life. Amazon.com Review: Lynda Barry's illustrated novel Cruddy has not one but three equally alarming openings. The first is a suicide note: "Dear Anyone Who Finds This, Do not blame the drugs." The next is a description of the lurid crucifix that hangs over the narrator's bed: "Some nights looking at him scares me so bad I can hardly move and I start doing a prayer for protection. But when the thing that is scaring you is already Jesus, who are you supposed to pray to?" The third is worthy of a nightmare fairytale, beginning "Once upon a cruddy time on a cruddy street on the side of a cruddy hill in the cruddiest part of a crudded-out town in a cruddy state, country, world, solar system, universe..." She's not exaggerating. It's 1971, and 16-year-old Roberta Rohbeson lives in what looks very much like hell. It's five years after the Lucky Chief Motel Massacre, after which Roberta was found wandering the desert, covered with blood and clutching her dog, Cookie, who suffers from "incurable skin problems." Even now, Roberta still won't talk about what happened. She lives with her mother and sister on the aforementioned cruddy street, hides in the weeds during her lunch period, and eventually befriends some suicidal misfits like herself. The novel intercuts their chemically enhanced adventures with scenes from a gore-filled road trip taken five years before. Hint No. 1: Roberta's father used to run a slaughterhouse. Hint No. 2: The maps inside the front covers have keys that read "Dead People We Left Behind" and "Places There Were Blood." Barry came to fame as a cartoonist, and though the humor in her strip Ernie Pook's Comeek is dark, nothing in it could prepare her fans for the sheer horror of Cruddy. The novel is funny, sort of, as long as you think naming a knife Little Debbie is funny, or lines like "A man who has been dead for a week in a hot trailer looks more like a man than you would first expect." What's more, it's compulsively, almost harrowingly, readable, written with the kind of velocity that makes you keep turning pages even when you don't want to. Despite the hallucinogenic quality of the violence around her, Roberta is never anything less than real, and her story will strike chords in anyone whose childhood was marked by ugliness and fear. Cruddy may be a bad acid trip, but if you can stomach the ride, it's a very good book. --Mary Park Average Rating:
 Rating:  - For those with a dark and twisted sense of humorCruddy is a little black diamond of a book that will resonate with those who possess an extremely dark sense of humor. While definitely not for the faint-hearted, Cruddy has vividly drawn characters and a complicated but satisfying narrative structure which alternates between 16-year-old Roberta's drug escapades in the present and the events that occurred five years earlier when authorities found her wandering the desert, covered in blood and unable to speak. Although the back-and-forth structure ... Read More Rating:  - StickyThis book sticks to the mind, keeping the images and characters lingering for weeks after reading the book. Rating: - Cruddy dreams come with Cruddy Unless you are a fan of horror movies, or prepared for dreadful dreams, you should not start reading Linda Berry's first and illustrated novel, Cruddy. Cruddy is a rich, dark, and raw story, with a strange sense of humor, full of violence and gross details, and no consideration for sensitive readers. Regardless of the reading interests, once started reading the novel, it becomes difficult to put it down. From the beginning, Roberta Rohbeson, the novel's sixteen year-old narrator and her story, hunt ... Read More Rating: - Deliciously morbid!"Cruddy" is seriously noir stuff, but filtered through what may be the blackest sense of humor I have ever encountered. This book is not for everyone, but if it does happen to be for you, then you are in for a seriously major trip. Ms. Barry's essentially outlandish premises (a daughter named Clyde?!), proprietary verbal inventions and astute wackiness remind me of Vonnegut, although her voice is much too unique to be derivative. There is more than a smattering of early John Waters-type ... Read More Rating: - Open letter to Ms. BarryHi. I've really enjoyed your work! Your looks on the other hand, not so much. I'd love to continue to buy and read your books. Unlike most of your readers who read it for free at their local Barnes & Noble or Borders, I shell out good money for your "art". So do me one favor, will ya? Please refrain from including your photo or any likeness of yourself on or in your books. You are what we in the male community like to describe as fugly. Which are the words F@cking & Ugly mashed together. Brilliant? ... Read More 
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