Product Description

"The End of Alice" treads the wafer-thin line between the evil and the everyday and caused a major controversy when it was first released in the US. The story centres on the correspondence of two paedophiles: one, the narrator, is a middle-aged child-killer serving his twenty-third year in prison; the other, his bland-speaking, sweet-seeming admirer, is a nineteenth-year-old woman intent on seducing a young neighbourhood boy. Slowly, through these letters, the narrator's monstrous character emerges.

Product Details

• Published on: 2006-06-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

From Amazon.com
The narrator is Chappy, a pedophile who's been locked up in Sing Sing for 23 years for the rape and decapitation of 12-year-old Alice. The tale alternates between Chappy's own story (both outside and inside of prison), and letters he receives from a 19-year-old girl who knows of Alice's fate and wants to start playing with 12-year-old boys. The girl's letters disturb Chappy, bringing his memories vividly to the fore. In prose that is both lyrical and horrifyingly direct, A.M. "Amy" Homes takes us into the minds of the correspondents. Chappy is bright, analytical, and reminiscent of Nabokov in the way he talks about his "Lolita." But the sex is graphic and often bizarre, and the author's tone is chilly, so it's not a book to be picked up lightly. As Daphne Merkin writes in the New York Times, it's a "splashy, not particularly likable book whose best moments are quietly observed and whose underlying themes are more serious than prurient."

From Library Journal
In this deeply disturbing novel, Homes (In a Country of Mothers, LJ 8/93) seems to be attempting to create as repulsive a protagonist as possible-a nameless pedophile serving his 23rd year at Sing Sing. Alongside his narrative is the tale of a 19-year-old college coed obsessed by a preteen boy. A large part of the novel centers on the half-real, half-imagined ties that develop between the convict and the college student as a result of her increasingly graphic letters to him. The rest is a reminiscence of his affair with a 12-year-old seductress named Alice that ends in her gruesome murder. Deliberately shocking and confrontational, Homes's purpose seems to be to force the reader into a kind of Dostoevskian identification with the blackest and most perverse elements of human nature. An optional purchase for larger libraries.
Lawrence Rungren, Bedford Free P.L., Mass.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"* 'A.M. Homes never plays it safe and it begins to look as if she can do almost anything' Michael Cunningham * 'If the first major literary marker of the American dream of aspiration, potential and never-ending youth was F. Scott Fitzgerald's lyrical piece of doomed yearning, The Great Gatsby, its postmodern flipside [is] A.M. Homes's The End of Alice, whose paired literary voices made a grotesque harmony of two yearners after the dream of youth' Ali Smith, Guardian * 'A.M. Homes instructs us about ourselves and shows us what we are blighted with and cringe from, our compulsions, repressions, longings, glimpses of madness' Ruth Rendell * 'Undeniably shocking... Superbly achieved by a writer who is a true artist in words' Vogue"

Customer Reviews

Different...in a good way
I really enjoyed this book. It is the first book I've read of AM Homes. I am not even sure what else she has written. The writing is brilliant and holds the reader throughout the entire novel. The way she flip flops between Chappy and the girl he corresponds with whilst sitting in jail is a brilliant concept. A few things will be said about Chappy and what's going on in jail or his story about Alice, and right when it comes to an area you would like to more about it would switch to a kind of sub chapter about the life of the girl he is corresponding with, and vice-versa. I hope that makes sense, in other words it's like watching a good television series that continually ends every episode with a cliff hanger. It makes the reader never want to put the book down, at least that's the effect it had on me. I would give it 5 stars and the only reason I didn't is because I think it ended a little too soon with little detail about what happened...I thought it would be a bit more drawn out in the end. You have to read to know what I am talking about. Great book though, and I highly recommend it!!

Great if you have an open mind
The End of Alice went above and beyond what I expected when I read the summary. It is very descriptive and not for the faint of heart or those unwilling to accept that criminals are, in fact, people too. Homes does an excellent job of letting the reader into the mind of a convicted child molester and murderer. I applaud her for her research on this novel as I would imagine it takes quite the talent to complete a book like this one. This book is definately for only the very open-minded reader. It is vulgar and often times disgusting in its description, but if you enjoy exploring new and very off the wall avenues when you choose your reading material I definately recommend this book.

Repulsive, Textual Vomit
If Hannibal Lechter were to pen a cheap Harlequin romance novel, this is would be the outcome. The author's overuse of ridculous adjectives and graphic sexual deviance does absolutely nothing to create any semblance of a story. These characters are so ridiculously pathological that I found myself actually laughing out loud. Scab eating? Oh, please. Why didn't the author throw in a farting contest as well?
Not too mention the sexual shock factor is littered with phrases like "moony mounds", "loving piles" and "milky brown suede." Hey readers! There is more rear-action than a Super Bowl Tailgate party. Absolutely nothing redeeming about this book. It is gross, infantile and just plain ridiculous. Pass the vomit basin!