Will I love Last Exit to Brooklyn?

I once heard a friend of mine describe Last Exit to Brooklyn as “a significant minor novel.” He was wrong. It’s a good deal more than that.

Set in the same Brooklyn in which one will find Herschel Cain, the main character in my own novel, before he becomes professional wrestler Haystacks Kane, yet light years away, Last Exit is a searing portrayal of life in the raw amongst the American underclass, profoundly disturbing and terribly, terribly sad. It shook me to my core when I read it not long after it was published in the mid-1960s, and has remained… show more.

Displaying the decaying carcass of post-war South Brooklyn, Hubert Selby Jr. mines a grim industrial wasteland, as bleak as his beleaguered characters imploding across six short stories, each prefaced by a Biblical passage.

A gang mauls a group of soldiers on leave. A transgender woman, abused by a homophobic brother, rejected by a drug dealer, overdoses. Facing a shotgun wedding, a young man abandons his pregnant girlfriend. A sex worker is gang raped to death. A corrupt, closeted union steward is severely beaten after sexually assaulting a boy.

This 1950s South Brooklyn, when the Brooklyn Army Terminal complex and waterfront… show more.

Selby got into writing late in his life (much like me!) but that doesn’t negate the richness of his five novels and the best one: Last Exit to Brooklyn. If you read about Selby’s life, he could just as easily write an autobiography and it would have proved that fact is stranger than fiction. Last Exit, is a pulled-together novel from his initial forays into creative writing and short fiction, but don’t worry about that, because the tales of down-and-out diversity are all jaw-dropping, eye-popping, mind-boggling, and gut-wrenching. These literary portraits capture the depravity of life at… show more.

Last Exit to Brooklyn tells the stories of a group of characters living on the edge of society in 1950s New York – drug addicts, prostitutes, transvestites, he-men struggling with their sexuality, and average Joes struggling just to survive. The prose is sublimely beautiful, and the world it paints is one rarely seen now in print. The book was a profound influence on me – it showed me how important it is to have compassion for your characters, no matter how dark or damned they might be.