The Lusty Man is a novel experience indeed. It is rather like watching the frozen activity of a Hieronymus Bosch painting or seeing a Breugel explode into manic life.
Terry Griggs’s first novel is a comic extravaganza of life in an island community. It is also about the lake surrounding that island, about water itself. The events of the novel are weirdly refracted. This is the story of a christening, a portrait of a community, a story of a quest -- the search for the Lusty Man, an iron-age Celtic fertility figure transported to these shores in the nineteenth century, which presides over the novel’s loving, quarrelling, and begetting.
The story revolves around members of the Stink family who live in unwholesome closeness at the clan home in Stinkville, Belchie Township, and in satellite mobile homes. Chet Stink plays ‘Jingle Bells’ by hitting diverse portions of his skull with a wrench; Tennessee Ernie Stink practices fire-swallowing with a BBQ-starter and a marshmallow on a toasting fork; the entire pack is reputed to live on road-kill. Into these lives and through them drift angels, ghosts, and an androgynous school teacher whose subversive methodology renders intriguing consequences.
The Lusty Man is a novel experience indeed.