The Old Gods Laugh

by Frank Yerby

In this rousing and breathtakingly suspenseful novel, the master story-teller moves from his traditional settings to the tumultuous world of a revolution-ravaged Caribbean country to give us a story at once contemporary and historical--full of color and romance, yet as pertinent to our lives as today's headlines. In this novel charged with blood and fire, with white hot passions, and with the clash of army against army, brother against brother, Frank Yerby shows again why he is one of Americas's most popular novelists.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Novels, Action

Paperback

First published January 1, 1964

About the author

Born in Augusta, Georgia to Rufus Garvin Yerby, an African American, and Wilhelmina Smythe, who was caucasian. He graduated from Haines Normal Institute in Augusta and graduated from Paine College in 1937. Thereafter, Yerby enrolled in Fisk University where he received his Master's degree in 1938. In 1939, Yerby entered the University of Chicago to work toward his doctorate but later left the university. Yerby taught briefly at Florida A&M University and at Southern University in Baton Rouge.

Frank Yerby rose to fame as a writer of popular fiction tinged with a distinctive southern flavor. In 1946 he became the first African-American to publish a best-seller with The Foxes of Harrow. That same year he also became the first African-American to have a book purchased for screen adaptation by a Hollywood studio, when 20th Century Fox optioned Foxes. Ultimately the book became a 1947 Oscar-nominated film starring Rex Harrison and Maureen O'Hara. Yerby was originally noted for writing romance novels set in the Antebellum South. In mid-century he embarked on a series of best-selling novels ranging from the Athens of Pericles to Europe in the Dark Ages. Yerby took considerable pains in research, and often footnoted his historical novels. In all he wrote 33 novels.

Reviews

[Tracy Sherman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first heard about this book when a great friend of mine, a wonderful animation director, had this on her list of the 10 most influential books of her life.
I had never heard of it before but the title was great and I just hope that the book could live up to it, I thought, at least it must be beautiful because of my friend's artistic tastes.
In fact it has become my seven-year-old son's favorite book. When I'm reading to him at night he always ask for The Legend of the Flying Hotdog, and takes great joy in changing the title to fit his thoughts of the moment. I think he's captivated by the fact that the main character in the book is such an evil guy, and actually that's the appealing part for me too. That the bad guy is not regulated to a walk on part at the end, only to be vanquished by the noble hero or heroine. We get to see the history, along with the machinations of this "dastardly wiener", one of our favorite descriptive phrases in the book.
Make no mistake there's a hero in the story, what kind of story would it be without a hero? But his hero doesn't win by might or luck, not by trickery or guile or even wisdom, he wins by kindness. Now there is a lesson I want my son to learn… I wouldn't mind if I could learn it for myself too.
And the book is beautiful, The illustrations look like oil paintings. Most of the book takes place in the winter and the feeling of the snow and ice is palpable.
The language is beautiful, simple but not childish, with just enough words for my son to ask me, "Papa, what does that mean?"
For some strange reason this book is out of print but I was lucky enough to find a copy of it. The best thing I can say about it is, I'm hope that you're lucky enough to find a copy too!

[Ernest Hogan · Rating 3 out of 5]

An American journalist encounters guerrilla warfare, a corrupt elite, an erupting volcano, beautiful women, and opinions not usually expressed in a Cold War thriller set in a mythical Central American country.

[Trent Fingland · Rating 2 out of 5]

I bought this book randomly for fifty cents at a thrift store, and then did some searching on the author online.

Apparently, Frank Yerby was the first african-american writer to have a novel adapted into a screenplay, as well as having a bestselling novel at all. I was in for a treat.

So imagine my surprise when the the book itself boils down to a burly white guy going to a fictional south american nation during a revolution, kicking everyone's ass, stealing the hearts of all the women, and then summarily beating them (but only because that is how you keep women in line, you see), always being right about everything, and just generally being the Ubermensch.

The action-schlock aspects of it had the potential of just being purely entertaining for their own sake, but Yerby spends the majority of the book on the romance between Peter and Alicia, which alternates between sickening and embarrassing to read.

Not recommended.

[Jon Hollihan · Rating 2 out of 5]

OK, I tried another Frank Yerby book, but I still don't like his writing. Gratuitous violence, awful fixation on rape & sex, stereotypical villains & other characters. Second star earned by his use of references to other literature, quotes, ancient history and the challenge of unfamiliar words & phrases causing me to do a little research. Did enjoy that challenge. And the challenge to understand what the hell Yerby was describing on numerous occasions in this novel. Would love to sit with Frank Yerby today to see if conversation with him gave any insight into how his mind worked.

Loved the artwork on the dust jacket image of the hardcover edition.

[Baron · Rating 2 out of 5]

*The Old Gods Laugh* by Frank Yerby, 3/10

This is a novel with an identity crisis. It presents as a pulp thriller and reaches for high literature, but achieves neither. The failures compound and conspire for a frustrating read. The final coffin-nail is the damned romance.

As pulp, it suffers from a passive, almost inert protagonist who, while he speaks in typical pulpy two-fisted tough-guy dialogue, is largely swept along by events, rarely asserting his will onto the plot. Frequently my hopes would rise that--finally!--Peter Reynolds is going to act. He's going to fight back, shoot bad guys or escape his captors or plan a clever scheme or *something*...only for him to be immediately cock-blocked by Yerby. Narratively, for the first 3/4th of the book Peter may as well be a quadriplegic wheeled from one scene to the next. When he does do something (rescue a wounded man after an air attack, drive the dictator's sister to the hospital after she's shot) the act is rendered functionally irrelevant. The wounded man dies anyway; anyone would have driven the sister to the hospital--and she was only winged anyway (she's literally dancing the next night).

In and of itself, this isn't a problem. Not all novels must be action oriented. But Peter is otherwise not an engaging or complex enough character to root for. Hell, the character of Jacinto, the crazy communist guerrilla out for revenge, would have been a far more compelling protagonist. But anyway, I have to judge it as a pulp because the novel has all those trappings. It's certainly has the sleaze factor (there's a strong fixation on rape). And while Yerby is clearly an intelligent writer (we get references to Hobbes, Oscar Wilde, Greek Mythology) with strong prose, much of the book is corny pulp dialogue...and then there is the malignant tumor that is the romance.

Upon meeting, our protagonist and the dictator's sister are immediately struck with the Love-at-first-sight virus. Symptoms include overwrought melodrama and sappy, maudlin dialogue which reads like parody--and it may be. I suspect Yerby was writing a send up of the genre, because I think he's a skilled enough writer to know better. In the intro he even warns that this is an unrealistic novel. Deliberate or not, it's a slog to read. Once again, an unrealistic romance is hardly a deal breaker for a pulp, but when your pulp lacks any of the good stuff, you have nothing to do but focus on the negative. Yerby's apparent ignorance of firearms doesn't help (Sten guns and Bren guns aren't interchangeable terms; no Walther P38 shoots "6.5mm"; BARs don't fire .50 BMG). Also, volcano ash doesn't turn people into statues. (The Pompeii figures are plaster molds of the hollows in the hardened ash where the bodies decomposed; this novel treats volcanic ash like Medusa pixie dust).

Charitablly, I'll admit I may not be giving Yerby a fair shake. He was mainly known for historical fiction set in the antebellum south, and this contemporary (early 1960s) novel may have been an experimental outlier. It does seem a polarizing work, from what I gather.

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

He always did tell a good story, and this one was gripping, but not one of his better ones to my mind.

[Mary Olsen · Rating 1 out of 5]

Oof. That's all I can say about this one.

[Rusty · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you enjoy action, adenture and romance, this read is for you. It's an entertaining read and reputedly the most popular of the author's work. I like reading novels of this type occasionally because they signify what people of that era were reading and what authors of that period were writing. It smacks a bit to me like Hemingway's novels of adventures during wartime as journalists struggled to report what was happening. It's a book of its time and fun to read.

[Meg · Rating 2 out of 5]

Once again found this mint condition 1964 Pocket Book edition in book exchange; never having heard of Frank Yerby I became intrigued after reading a quick bio. Heavy duty 60's in style and content!

[Jim Puskas · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of Yerby's more engaging books, now long out of print but worth a search if you enjoy lightweight tales in exotic settings, this one in Central America, complete with the usual mix of dictators, lusty women, revolutionaries, priests, etc.
The kind of stuff B movies are made of.

[John · Rating 1 out of 5]

I do not beleive that fran yerby wrote this . it was terrible, poor characters, no plot ect

[Tina · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wicked flying weasel's icy heart is melted by the clever boy he's taken captive. Lovely ink and watercolor paintings by the brilliant Dan Lane. A beautiful story.

[Leona]

I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/13528858

[Michael David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Honestly, I am usually unimpressed with African-American literature, because it seems to me that most of their works revolve around racial issues and their burgeoning freedom in the twentieth-century. While I do adhere to the notion of writing what one knows about, the quality of their writing is unimpressive compared to other modern masters of literature. Toni Morrison and James Baldwin seem to me to be popular not because they wrote masterful literature, but because they were the best African-American authors around writing about their race and its issues.

I'd be shot by critics for this, but I prefer authors like Frank Yerby. I think he's a better storyteller than either Morrison or Baldwin, because he doesn't drag race into his stories. He just tells a story the best way he knows how. When I picked this novel up, however, it wasn't the blurb at the back that drew me in: it was the pink-and-purple palette dovetailed with the inviting cover art that made me decide to read the book.

Because I vacillated the first time I saw this book, I almost lost my copy to being buried in the book stacks of the second-hand bookstore I patronize. I was lucky that after poring through each nook of the store, I finally stumbled upon it once more. I have no regrets.

Before I expound upon this novel's merits, I admit that this book isn't a masterpiece. It's just refreshing to me that an African-American writer wrote something that isn't heavily racial in nature and does well with it. The book is imperfect (and I will tackle and write about its imperfections later), but is nevertheless impressive.

My central problem with the novel was the occasionally questionable characterization: for example, in the later chapters, Reynolds was occasionally beastly towards his girlfriend, Alicia, and there was no reason other than the fact that Alicia allowed her mother to die in the dictator's last-ditch effort to survive. (Granted, Reynolds did hit his previous girlfriend when she attempted to hurt him, too, so there's not as much incongruence as I initially thought.) Overall, however, Yerby's characterization wasn't great, and that was just one example.

In spite of that, however, Yerby did well in a lot of the novel's other aspects, and that is enough (at least for me) to rate it as a 5/5.

First, Yerby's dialogue in this novel was immaculate until the final section. At times I'd smile because of the sharpness of his description and the piquancy of the characters' exchange. Although the quality of description and dialogue declined in the final chapters, it was still quite well-written. For example,

'There is only one excuse for certain acts. Love. The kind of love that continues even after one has resumed a vertical position. That goes on. Forever.' (p. 100)

Second, the plot was all right: an American, Reynolds, goes to the small dictatorship of Costa Verde and initially tries to free a priest in order to incite a revolution. As the story progresses, and he goes deeper into the city, he meets a 'tribal' lady whom he becomes attracted to. The catch is that the lady is the sister of the dictator, and Reynolds has a partner who slit her own throat because she loved him.

Third, I think his use of the Spanish language and his transition and translation into English was well-done. He reminded me of the technique done in John Huston's Kremlin Letter where Russian was first used to show that the characters were conversing in that language, then segued to English later. As Philippines was colonized by Spain for more than 300 years, I occasionally understood the nuanced exchanges of the characters, and was impressed. Hijo de puta remains to be a great insult nowadays.

Finally, and most importantly, is the novel's social commentary. The cynical nature of this novel serves it extremely well: in fact, Yerby prefigured the Marcos dictatorship of 1972 here in the Philippines. He even describes the current Philippines accurately:

'There's nothing ennobling about poverty, -- quite the contrary. The people are, you know, if you're not totally a fool, a disgusting conglomeration of stupid and filthy animals.' (p. 125)

Furthermore:

'You have a perfect demonstration of Malthusian principles, under a religious hierarchy which makes any effective birth control impossible. You have a wealthy upper class ... Who, while keeping not two, but three sets of books, and managing to escape paying taxes entirely, swear at us because our contribution to their welfare isn't greater ... And, on the other hand, you have Commies. Who promise you the moon and the stars, and deliver the rationing of even those miserable foodstuffs formerly available to the hungry. Who, after liquidating the poor, goddam noble, deluded kids they've sucked in by their propaganda and used as cannon fodder to gain their ends will substitute for the crude job those gorillas did to face a subtler kind of torture ... ' (p. 132 - 133)

And finally:

'Never in all of history have revolutionists sprung from the ranks of the proletariat, for the very simple reason that to upend the world, envy is a more potent weapon than despair.' (p. 196)

Welcome to the Philippines, Mr. Yerby!

These quotes and the novel's title link into each other perfectly: The Old Gods Laugh pertains to the old pagan gods of Zopocomapetl and the inevitability of man to control his fate. People in the novel perish because of a volcano's fickleness, and the dictator, ironically, foments a successful revolution against him because he didn't respect the pagan rituals of the endemic Indians. The people who topple the dictator are shown to be no better than the dictator himself: Jacinto was no improvement over the dead Villalonga, and the aftermath of the novel is a country falling further into ruin despite the best efforts of our protagonist and his Alicia.



Fate laughs at us all.