A review by krbkrbkrb
The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West

3.0

West does realism very well, and most of the book has the same sort of realism about Hollywood that you find in film noir and some of Bradbury's stories. Toward the end, it becomes bizarrely violent, going from a very detailed cock-fight to the abuse of a dwarf and on to rape fantasies and a grown man beating up a child and then being destroyed by a mob. Where it begins only sort of sad, it ends up appalling.