Stanley Elkin
Stanley Elkin was never exactly popular, but his dark tragi-comic fantasies appealed to an off-beat minority. The Living End, written in 1979, is still very readable, though hard to describe. It manages to include a journey through heaven and hell where there really are pearly gates, and you are really damned to eternal torment because you took the Lord’s name in vein, and a war between Minneapolis and St. Paul [“Let me tell you something, gentlemen. A St. Paul baby ain’t got no business on the point of a Minneapolis bayonet.”] Elkin’s twisted humour is not for everyone. Does anyone read him, nowadays? So many interesting and unique writers end up lost in the shuffle of time.
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