And the Ass Saw the Angel is a surreal and mythic-visionary epic novel. The story stretches over a hundred-year long violent and miraculous history of religious insanity, lynching and incest in a fictional American outpost.
The novel is mainly told as an inner monologue through the retarded protagonist, Euchrid Eucrow. He is the decendant of a clan marked by generations of inbreeding and mindless drinking. He is born mute, and is regularly haunted by epileptic fits. He camouflages his sensitivity in order to survive in a world of brutality, ignorance and evil. Euchrid is gradually transformed from his passive and dreamlike voyeuristic state, in which he can hear animals and Nature talking to him, to become an avenger with delusions of grandeur and fantasies of being God's tool on Earth.
In this southern-gothic universe of booze and Bible, every character is magnified: Euchrid's grotesque and sadistic parents, the town whore with the heart of gold, the fanatical preacher, and the pathetic, but vicious hobos.
With all it's biblical echoes and it's epic proportions, And the Ass Saw the Angel is first and foremost a disturbing tale of a martered soul. The tale of Euchrid's painful existence is conveyed in a unique musical language that operates on every level - from harsh, drunken brawling to high prose related to the Old Testament, from comic-macabre scenes to sublime Nature-poetry.
"In 1985, I went to live in Berlin, where I got it into my head to write a novel, and for the next three years I locked myself away in a room in Kreuzburg and wrote it. I called it And the Ass Saw the Angel. It was about a mad hermetic mute boy called Euchrid Eucrow, who, having been denied the faculty of speech, eventually explodes in a catharsis of rage and brings to its knees the religious community in which he lives. The story, set in the American South and told through the voice or non-voice of Euchrid Eucrow, was written in a kind of a hyper-poetic thought-speak, not meant to be spoken - a mongrel language that was part-Biblical, part-Deep South dialect, part-gutter slang, at times obscenely reverent and at others reverently obscene. Throughout the story, God fills the mute boy with information, loads him up with bad ideas, "hate inspiration straight from God", as he calls it, but with no one to talk to and no way to talk, Euchrid, like a blocked pipe, bursts. For me, Euchrid is Jesus struck dumb, he is the blocked artist, he is internalised imagination become madness."
Quote taken from "The Flesh Made Word" printed in King Ink II, Black Spring Press Ltd 1997