Twisted Minds

The stories are "Witches Brew," about a sixteenth-century witch who seduces men into her home and then turns them into pigs; "Prison Break," a story of a young boy in the late 1930's who gets sent to juvenile detention for robbery; and "The Dark of Night," about Jessie, one of those cool, wild biker boys who gets into an accident after which he does not know whether he is alive or dead.

The triptych of stories are unrelated but are twined together to dramatize young adult pathologies. The characterizations and plots are utterly realized with an incisive but non-intrusive modernism. Spikes' voice has the quality of speaking directly into the modern debate without being out of place, without being too common, slyly hooking in the reader into a state of suspended disbelief which the reader will find familiar, lived-in and sensible. This is a groundbreaking work and Roy V. Spikes is a name to watch in American literature's futurescape.