The Neon Bible

In a dilapidated house on a hill outside town. David grows up shy and friendless: a reluctant outsider in the small-town Bible Belt of the 1940's. The God-fearing folk snub his family because Poppa can't afford the church dues . Foul-breathed Mrs. Watkins of County Elementary School calls him a bad influence. And every night the preacher's neon Bible lights up - dominating the view from the hill just as the precher's meddlesome. bigoted brand of Christianity dominates the town. David's sole ally is Aunt Mae - magnificent, voluminous, yellow-haired Aunt Mae with her theatrical past, film start fantasies and outrageous gowns that (she tells David) have been lauded onstage from Charleston to New Orleans. John Kennedy Toole, whose comic masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces won the Pulitzer Prize twelve years after his suicide at the age of 31. He wrote the Neon Bible when he was just 16. Suppressed for years by Toole's mother and the subject of a bitter legal wrangele among his heirs, it is now published in paperback for the first time. 162 pages