book data
24 ratings, 3.42 average rating, 4 reviews
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published
January 1st 1998
(first published 1953)
by Serpent's Tail
binding
Paperback, 192 pages
isbn
1852424494
(isbn13: 9781852424497)
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other reviews (showing 1-20 of 34)
Read in July, 1997
recommends it for:
family reunion drunks
Nightmarish noir about a stevedore who may or may not have killed his prostitute sister. Only his grimy brother knows for sure and isn't telling.
The obscurity of his crime sends him to a waterfront dive where he drinks endlessly with a slumming rich kid. His beautiful sister toys with the stevedore's affections, and he romances her, eventually marrying her in a drunken stupor.
"Moon In The Gutter" has bizarre familial themes running through it: bizarre brother-sister relations and f...more
The obscurity of his crime sends him to a waterfront dive where he drinks endlessly with a slumming rich kid. His beautiful sister toys with the stevedore's affections, and he romances her, eventually marrying her in a drunken stupor.
"Moon In The Gutter" has bizarre familial themes running through it: bizarre brother-sister relations and f...more
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Read in March, 2008
David Goodis is commonly ranked in the top tier of noir novelists, and The Moon in the Gutter is commonly ranked among his best work. One recent example: in The Rough Guide to Crime Fiction (2007), Barry Forshaw cites The Moon in the Gutter as his representative Goodis text in arguing that, of all the noir novelists, "Goodis comes the closest to the existential angst of Camus and Sartre." I wish I could see it, but I can't. The main thing I see in The Moon in the Gutter ...more
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Read in January, 2007
Too bad Goodis is dead, because I am really interested in the theme of this book. I'd like to ask him about upper class culture clashing with low culture, and why he doesn't believe that they can co-exist. Goodis is so overly distracted by this theme that he doesn't develop the plot into something more credible or more interesting. The tension was missing.
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