DBC Pierre

Here's my WaPo review of DBC Pierre's Lights Out in Wonderland, a book I unexpectedly liked. I did my homework on Pierre, reading his first two novels, Vernon God Little and Ludmila's Broken English. The first one is famous and famously terrible, a story of a Texas school shooter written in numbing first-person slang with one absurd caricature after the next. Big-time English award winner for no apparent reason. The second had a lot more potential, but it was a novel where the writer had bitten off way more than he could chew. I didn't expect much with Lights Out, but I found it very direct, very focused, in a way the others were not. I'd say more, but I pretty much said everything in the review.