by James Dickey
If you can persevere through the first third of this book, it will reward you with an excellent vintage thriller. But it was a challenge to get there. I don’t know what it was about the early to mid 1970’s that had the American adult population so invested in interminable navel-gazing, but it seems ...
The film version of Deliverance is known for "that scene," the one where Bobby, one of four city men traversing a wild river in Georgia, is raped by a "hillbilly." The scene is a bit different in the book--there's no "Squeal like a pig!" moment--but essentially the same. Before I even saw the film, ...
Deliverance is set up the same way as horror movies like Friday the 13th are set up: a group of people go off in the woods, meet some bad guys, find life suddenly reduced to its essentials, until one of them rises up and takes a stand. But there's a difference. As all those horror movie sequels tell...
This is the most literate "thriller" I've ever encountered. I was absolutely mesmerized by James Dickey's insightful, probing prose, at the thoughts and feelings of his main character, Ed Gentry. Here is an example of a book whose film version, as famous as it is, barely scratches the surface of the...
I can only think of three reasons someone reads Deliverance. You're a bibliophile who refuses to watch movies if they're based on books, you hate Burt Reynolds, or you have a fantasy wherein you're raped at gunpoint by country boys. My point is, no one watches the movie and says to themselves, "I've...
I expected more. Nevertheless, I liked it.
Deliverance by James Dickey was a book that really took me by surprise. Outside of my comfort zone Deliverance tells the story of four men closing in on middle age and looking for a little adventure take to the remote white waster river in the Georgia wilderness with two canoes. The adventure turn...