Like lots of eighteen-year-olds, the boy at the center of Crum doesn't know where he's going, but he knows he is leaving. This novel, named after a real-life, gritty little coal town on the West Virginia-Kentucky border, offers a sometimes shocking, often outrageous, always irreverent look at this young man’s attempt to escape his home.In Crum, the boys fight, swear, chase - and sometimes catch girls, and have unflattering things to say about their neighbors across the river in Kentucky. The adults are cramped and clueless, hemmed in by the mountains that loom over this tiny suffocating town. And to boys flush with the hormones of youth, this situation is full of wonder, dejection, and even possibility.Lee Maynard, a native of Crum in Wayne County, West Virginia, spins this tale of a young man whose rebellion against the people and the place of his childhood allows him to reject the comfort and familiarity of his home in search of his place in a larger world.This novel stirred deep feelings in West Virginia, as readers reacted in different ways to the poetry and reality of Maynard's creation. Since its highly successful first publication, this novel has become an underground classic, with used copies now scarce and costly. Maynard adds a brief epilogue to this new edition, and West Virginia writer Meredith Sue Willis provides an introduction. Crum shot to number eight on the Doubleday Best Seller list within its first month of publication, despite its ban in West Virginia. He has since published a sequel to Crum entitled Screaming with the Cannibals.

CRUM

Literature & Fiction

MAYNARD, LEE

Literary

Vandalia Press

Screaming with the Cannibals, the much anticipated sequel to Lee Maynard’s cult classic Crum, gets its title when the central character finds himself in an evangelical service in Kentucky on the other side of the Tug River from his native West Virginia. As the folks touched by the Spirit rave and howl, he remembers how, back in Crum, the folks used to tell him to stay on his side of the river, because the people on the other side were known to eat their children. And now, here he is in a Kentucky holy-roller church, screaming with the cannibals. 
Since the first novel, our protagonist has visited the West Virginia holler where his family lived before he moved up to the greater sophistication of Crum, and there he discovers that his favorite uncle has disappeared from the face of the earth in a moonshining accident. He then meets the girl who makes the earth – or at least the hay loft – move for him, quite literally falling for her. From there he goes to Kentucky, and then to Myrtle Beach, where he gets hired as a lifeguard, although he cannot swim a stroke. 
If Crum is (as many have said) West Virginia’s answer to J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, then Screaming with the Cannibals is Appalachia’s response to John Updike’s Rabbit Run.

SCREAMING WITH THE CANNIBALS

“A motorcycle has no imagination. A motorcycle is a chunk of refined iron ore configured to go forward at varying rates of speed. A motorcycle cannot bleed, and it cannot think. Therefore, it cannot have an imagination. But all we have to do is slide onto the saddle of a motorcycle and our own imaginations go berserk. We become different people; we start to think differently. Our bodies are sitting on the machine but our minds are in some ethereal place where all the mundane things of our lives are hidden from view. We see the world in an entirely different way. We can go places beyond the imagination.” Why ride? Lee Maynard, life-long motorcycle rider and author of seven novels, answers the question from his own perspective. In A Triumph of the Spirit, we are taken to the far reaches of a human spirit that searches constantly for the horizon, only to discover that the horizon always is out of reach. And that is when we understand that it is the search, not the finding, that is the center point of our being. It is the ride.

a Triumph of the Spirit: One Writer’s Experience of the Machine, the Mind, the Spirit . . . and the Horizon

Religion & Spirituality

Independently published

Real people don’t run away from. . .But real people can run away to. . . In 1936, a child is born in the mountains of West Virginia. In 2005, he scatters his past into a deep canyon of rock. The Pale Light of Sunset: Scattershots and Hallucinations in an Imagined Life illuminates the journey of this boy, a constant tourist and visitor, who travels everywhere, yet belongs nowhere. Through tales of swarming hornets and swinging bullies, love affairs with the land and its people, and near death by frostbite and heat stroke, the absurd hilarity and clear, tender voice found within this story navigates a surreal road paved by the experiences of one man. Author of nationally acclaimed and locally banned novels Crum and Screaming with the Cannibals, Lee Maynard details an imaginative account of his journey through seventy years of hard living—from West Virginia, to Mexico, the Arctic Circle, and beyond. Scattered and hallucinated, The Pale Light of Sunset grants a long-awaited glimpse into the bent condition of the Maynard brain.

THE PALE LIGHT OF SUNSET: SCATTERSHOTS AND HALLUCINATIONS IN AN IMAGINED LIFE

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Real people don't run away from. . .But real people can run away to. . . In 1936, a child is born in the mountains of West Virginia. In 2005, he scatters his past into a deep canyon of rock. The Pale Light of Sunset: Scattershots and Hallucinations in an Imagined Life illuminates the journey of this boy, a constant tourist and visitor, who travels everywhere, yet belongs nowhere. Through tales of swarming hornets and swinging bullies, love affairs with the land and its people, and near death by frostbite and heat stroke, the absurd hilarity and clear, tender voice found within this story navigates a surreal road paved by the experiences of one man. Author of nationally acclaimed and locally banned novels Crum and Screaming with the Cannibals, Lee Maynard details an imaginative account of his journey through seventy years of hard living-from West Virginia, to Mexico, the Arctic Circle, and beyond. Scattered and hallucinated, The Pale Light of Sunset grants a long-awaited glimpse into the bent condition of the Maynard brain.

The Pale Light of Sunset: Scattershots and Hallucinations in an Imagined Life

West Virginia University Press

The Scummers (Crum Trilogy)

Contemporary

The Scummers

In this sequel to Crum, Jesse Stone is still on the move. He finds himself in a holy-roller church in Kentucky, on the other side of the Tug River from his native West Virginia, "screaming with the cannibals." From Kentucky he heads to Myrtle Beach, where he gets hired as a lifeguard, although he can’t even swim. Of course, trouble follows Jesse Stone. And so he is always in a hurry to leave—and he doesn’t much care where he is going. Throughout this tale, Jesse anxiously continues his search for a freedom and a future that he knows exists outside of his familiar world.

SCREAMING WITH THE CANNIBALS (The Crum Trilogy)

In Crum, a gritty coal town on the West Virginia-Kentucky border, the boys fight, swear, chase and sometimes catch girls. The adults are cramped in and clueless, hemmed in by the mountains. The weight of wonder, dejection, and even possibility loom over this tiny, suffocating town. This story is the tale of Jesse Stone, who doesn’t know where he’s going, but knows he is leaving, and whose rebellion against the people and the place of his childhood allows him to reject the comfort and familiarity of his home in search of his place in a larger world.

Crum (Crum Trilogy)

In the third and final part of the Crum Trilogy, Jesse Stone once again embarks upon his constant search for a place in the world. At the start of The Scummers, Jesse hits the road and heads West, looking to experience something - anything - that will fulfill his intrinsic desires to escape, and to belong. He ends up in California, where he fools around, mischievously fighting and drinking, yet always narrowly escaping punishment. Soon enough, Jesse runs out of luck. He finds himself arrested and is condemned to serve out his sentence under the supervision of the United States Army. Suddenly Jesse Stone can no longer run. Suddenly Jesse Stone is a solider. Full of intense violence and cutting humor, this tale is the culminating confession of a young man who has wandered from a small town in West Virginia and back again in the hopes of finding his home.

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

Books by MAYNARD, LEE

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

CRUM

SCREAMING WITH THE CANNIBALS

a Triumph of the Spirit: One Writer’s Experience of the Machine, the Mind, the Spirit . . . and the Horizon

THE PALE LIGHT OF SUNSET: SCATTERSHOTS AND HALLUCINATIONS IN AN IMAGINED LIFE

The Pale Light of Sunset: Scattershots and Hallucinations in an Imagined Life

The Scummers (Crum Trilogy)

The Scummers

SCREAMING WITH THE CANNIBALS (The Crum Trilogy)

Crum (Crum Trilogy)

The Scummers (Crum Trilogy)