This book is exceptional. It is small, easy to handle and can be understood by a wide range of people in various locations. The depth of the processes and inights could transform a school. I work as the head of a school in India and used this book for discussions among staff over a week of discussions.It offered an open, serious, non threatening way of exploring significant issues. In its style is ingrained the deep feeling the authors must have for schools and for creating healthy environments for the young,

This exciting novel shows the South of the 40's and 50's edging toward secularism. For a short time, Robert Treadwell, a fundamentalist with a violent temper, fuses two Southern traditions -- storytelling and preaching -- into a charismatic ministry among the hill people by telling them contemporary versions of New Testament parables. Before his ministry begins, however, Robert's fanaticism has led to the death of one of his twin sons, and later causes his younger son to be beaten up by bullies, and his oldest son, Will, to retaliate against Robert and then to die. The surviving twin, Luke, narrates parts of the novel. Luke, who can't accept his father's religious mania, nevertheless is haunted by visions of his dead twin, intimations of the "community of the quick and the dead, that those of us alive should could the dead among us, as the dead, I assumed in a spaceless, timeless realm, numbered us among them." Elizabeth, the other narrator, seeks spiritual fulfillment, first through dance and music, then through missionary work as Robert Treadwell's earliest disciple, and fainnly through the flesh with her dead sister's husband, the sensualist Will Treadwell. "The Quick and the Dead" is eloqunet on the anquish of reaching spiritual understanding . . . .

Carol Ames, The New York Times, August 8, 1986

Never read it, but my dad wrote it

Southern literature tends to be stamped with the obsessions of William Faulkner: doomed and crazy families, legacies of guilt and grudges. The Quick and the Dead maintains that tradition. Wilson chronicles tribal hatred in an Alabama hill-country clan headed by a self-taught itinerant preacher, Robert Treadwell, who speaks in earthy parables and commits self-mutiliation. The book begins and ends with fireball confrontations between the evangelist and his firstborn son, recalled by another son, Luke. The rest, rich in incident, sounds the depths of sexual betrayal and despair. Treadwell calls himself a storyteller, a term that provides a sly, apt link between novelist and revivalist. Each, Wilson suggest, is trying in his way to explain the randon nature of fate. In both the father's febrile sermons and, in the son's cool observations, there is no justice, no fairness. There is, however, the restless energy of a fine writer.