The Colorful Apocalypse: Journeys in Outsider Art

The Reverend Howard Finster was twenty feet tall, suspended in darkness. Or so he appeared in the documentary film that introduced a teenaged Greg Bottoms to the renowned outsider artist whose death would help inspire him, fourteen years later, to travel the country. Beginning in Georgia with a trip to Finster’s famous Paradise Gardens, his journey—of which The Colorful Apocalypse is a masterly chronicle—is an unparalleled look into the lives and visionary works of some of Finster’s contemporaries: the self-taught evangelical artists whose beliefs and oeuvres occupy the gray area between madness and Christian ecstasy. With his prodigious gift for conversation and quietly observant storytelling, Bottoms draws us into the worlds of such figures as William Thomas Thompson, a handicapped ex-millionaire who painted a 300-foot version of the book of Revelation; Norbert Kox, an ex-member of the Outlaws biker gang who now lives as a recluse in rural Wisconsin and paints apocalyptic visual parables; and Myrtice West, who began painting to express the revelatory visions she had after her daughter was brutally murdered. These artists’ works are as wildly varied as their life stories, but without sensationalizing or patronizing them, Bottoms—one of today’s finest young writers—gets at the heart of what they have in common: the struggle to make sense, through art, of their difficult personal histories. In doing so, he weaves a true narrative as powerful as the art of its subjects, a work that is at once an enthralling travelogue, a series of revealing biographical portraits, and a profound meditation on the chaos of despair and the ways in which creativity can help order our lives.

Arts & Photography

Bottoms, Greg

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

The Reverend Howard Finster was twenty feet tall, suspended in darkness. Or so he appeared in the documentary film that introduced a teenaged Greg Bottoms to the renowned outsider artist whose death would help inspire him, fourteen years later, to travel the country. Beginning in Georgia with a trip to Finster’s famous Paradise Gardens, his journey—of which The Colorful Apocalypse is a masterly chronicle—is an unparalleled look into the lives and visionary works of some of Finster’s contemporaries: the self-taught evangelical artists whose beliefs and oeuvres occupy the gray area between madness and Christian ecstasy. With his prodigious gift for conversation and quietly observant storytelling, Bottoms draws us into the worlds of such figures as William Thomas Thompson, a handicapped ex-millionaire who painted a 300-foot version of the book of Revelation; Norbert Kox, an ex-member of the Outlaws biker gang who now lives as a recluse in rural Wisconsin and paints apocalyptic visual parables; and Myrtice West, who began painting to express the revelatory visions she had after her daughter was brutally murdered. These artists’ works are as wildly varied as their life stories, but without sensationalizing or patronizing them, Bottoms—one of today’s finest young writers—gets at the heart of what they have in common: the struggle to make sense, through art, of their difficult personal histories. In doing so, he weaves a true narrative as powerful as the art of its subjects, a work that is at once an enthralling travelogue, a series of revealing biographical portraits, and a profound meditation on the chaos of despair and the ways in which creativity can help order our lives.

A taut, powerful memoir of madness, Angelhead documents the violent, drug-addled descent of the author's brother, Michael, into schizophrenia. Beginning with Michael's first psychotic break—seeing God in his suburban bedroom window while high on LSD—Greg Bottoms recounts, in gripping, dramatic prose, the bizarre disappearances, suicide attempts, and the shocking crime that land Michael in the psychiatric wing of a maximum security prison. A work of nonfiction with the form and imagery of a novel, Angelhead enables the reader to witness not only the fragmenting of a mind, but of a family as well. "A tour-de-force memoir. . . . Bottoms writes like a poet, he writes like he is on fire."—Esquire, Book of the Year, 2000 "Angelhead is a brilliant, albeit inconceivably sad book. The fact that Bottoms survived the ordeal is incredible. But the fact that he could write about it with such pathos and insight is nothing less than extraordinary."—Atlanta Journal-Constitution "Greg Bottoms has provided a biographical novel about his brother that may be as close as most of us will ever get to knowing what it is to be truly mad. Angelhead is a story nearly as terrifying as the disease it describes."—Psychology Today

Angelhead: My Brother's Descent into Madness

Biographies & Memoirs

Reference & Collections

"My brother saw the face of God. You never recover from a trauma like that." So begins Angelhead, a taut, powerful memoir of the madness and crime that rips a family apart. "I didn't see God, of course, but I saw my brother seeing God; I saw how petrified he was, how convinced." Set in Tidewater, Virginia, in the 1980s and early 1990s, Angelhead documents the violent, drug-addled, schizophrenic descent of the author's brother, Michael. Commencing with Michael's first psychotic break at age 14 -- high on acid, seeing God in his suburban bedroom window -- through a series of petty crimes, bizarre disappearances, and suicide attempts to the shocking crime that landed him in the psychiatric wing of a maximum security prison, Angelhead enables us to witness firsthand, as never before, the fragmenting of a mind and a family. "I knew, still know, that he saw, in some form, His or Her or Its face." Bottoms shows, in pitch-perfect prose and with great empathy and dramatic tension, the psychological decline of his brother as he becomes obsessed first with heavy metal music, martial arts, and the occult, and then with the more bizarre aspects of Christianity. We not only see the effects Michael's odd and increasingly violent behavior has on the people around him, but also come to understand how the author, now a successful writer and journalist, used the power of language and storytelling both to save himself and to forgive his brother. With the fast pace and seamless structure of the best crime writing and the moral sophistication and depth of our finest literature, Angelhead will challenge what we know about mental illness and its impact on us all. It is a brilliant work of unusual intensity. "In his room he was having his first of many psychotic breaks. It came in the form of crippling guilt, ruthless introspection. He was Jesus being scolded by an angry Father. He wore sin, all sin, heavy as lead shackles. God made him look at himself and he was a stone with a minuscule heart."

Crown

In pitch-perfect prose, Greg Bottoms shows with great empathy and dramatic tension the psychological decline of his brother as he becomes obsessed first with heavy metal music, martial arts, and the occult, and then with the more bizarre aspects of Christianity. We see not only the effect Michael's odd and increasingly violent behavior has on the people around him, but also come to understand how the author, now a successful writer and journalist, used the power of language and storytelling both to save himself and to forgive his brother.

Angelhead: A Memoir

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Mental Health

Three Rivers Press

In an intricately linked series of poetic, short tales set in a 1983 suburb, Greg Bottoms portrays his life as one of two at-risk” boys as they attempt to learn how to beand what it means to bemen. By turns funny, disquieting, and moving, Fight Scenes takes an unsparing look at juvenile disaffection and the dark side of white, working-class masculinity. By narrating his experiences with childhood buddy Mark, Bottoms shows how many of America’s young men learn to think about work, sex, weakness, violence, and themselves. In a pared-down, highly readable style that brings to mind the work of Raymond Carver, Sherman Alexie, and Denis Johnson, Bottoms has created a work of literature that shows how even the most accepted forms of toughness” can have a damaging, disorienting, and finally dehumanizing effect on everyone, especially kids.

Fight Scenes

Memoirs

Counterpoint

Provocatively blurring the lines between autobiography, short fiction, and essay, Greg Bottoms presents a series of fifteen honest and beautifully spare tales of class, poverty, violence, and racism set in the margins of the urban and suburban New South. An ode to Pulitzer-nominee Breece D'J Pancake's life and untimely death, the title story deftly interweaves Bottoms's personal history to insightful result. In the transformative The Metaphor,” the narrator proclaims, when the world looks like every little promise has been lanced and bled out, you need a story to tell yourself.” So we move seamlessly between the lives of people both real and imagined and the life of the author, and what emerges is not only a composite of sharply drawn and revealing moments, but also a book-length meditation on the nature of, and necessity for, storytelling itself. Including three new stories Sam at the Gun Show,” Strangers and Dreams,” and Heroism #2” this revised edition announces an understated, arresting new voice in literature.

Sentimental, Heartbroken Rednecks: Stories from the New South

Literature & Fiction

United States

Catapult

In Spiritual American Trash, Greg Bottoms goes beyond the examination of eight outsider artists” and inhabits the spirit of their work and stories in engaging vignettes. From the janitor who created a holy throne room out of scraps in a garage, to the lonely wartime mother who filled her home with driftwood replicas of Bible scenes, Bottoms illustrates the peculiar grace in madness. Using facts as scaffolding he constructs intimate narratives around each artist, painting their poor and difficult circumstances on the outskirts of American society and demonstrating struggle’s influence on their largely undiscovered art. Both mournful and celebratory, these profiles embrace these compulsive creators with empathy and visceral sensory details. Each sentence reads with the cadence of a preacher who engages the art of the spirit and passion that often strays into obsession. Raised in the working-class South as a devout Christian with a deeply troubled brother, Bottoms understands how these eight outsiders made art for a higher power and for themselves.”

Spiritual American Trash: Portraits from the Margins of Art and Faith

In Pitiful Criminals, Greg Bottoms offers thirteen genre-bending chapters from his past that take a close look at the lives of small-time criminals driven, often by confusion and desperation, to deeds that range from the absurd to the heinous. We meet the author’s schizophrenic arsonist brother, a depressed pot grower, a damaged ex-dealer who barely escaped a violent burglary, a born-again teenage shooter, and other alienated Americans pushed to extremes by psychology and circumstance. Forceful, poetic, unique, and utterly uncompromising, it is an unforgettable tour of the dark side of the human condition. Greg Bottoms’s innovative fiction and creative nonfiction have focused on the American South, the effects of violence on individual lives, criminal behavior, mental illness, ecstatic and spiritual experience, and class in America. He blends explicitly autobiographical and biographical content with artful storytelling, a cultural journalist’s observations, and a philosopher’s deep inquiry into the strange ways we live now. This is postmodern crime fiction at its gritty and original best.

Pitiful Criminals

This powerful collection of rich, skillfully crafted stories by the author of Angelhead chronicles the lives of eccentrics--from a senile old woman to a crackhead thief--with tenderness and honesty.

Sentimental Heartbroken Rednecks: Stories

Contemporary

Context Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bottoms, Greg. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Bottoms, Greg

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bottoms, Greg. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Colorful Apocalypse: Journeys in Outsider Art

The Colorful Apocalypse: Journeys in Outsider Art

Angelhead: My Brother's Descent into Madness

Angelhead: My Brother's Descent into Madness

Angelhead: A Memoir

Fight Scenes

Sentimental, Heartbroken Rednecks: Stories from the New South

Spiritual American Trash: Portraits from the Margins of Art and Faith

Pitiful Criminals

Sentimental Heartbroken Rednecks: Stories