From Publishers Weekly
This early Caldwell novel about a boxer on the skids is one of four new entries in LSU's Voices of the South reprints series which also features The Last of the Southern Girls by Willie Morris, $11.95 -1956-3; Band of Angels by Robert Penn Warren, $12.95 -1946-6; and The Morning and the Evening by Joan Williams, $11.95 -1955-5).Copyright 1994 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Caldwell's 1930 follow-up to his premiere novel, The Bastard, features another collection of down and outers. Here palooka Blondy Niles finds himself hitting rock bottom, with death as the only way out.Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Published in 1930, Poor Fool was Erskine Caldwell's second novel. Like most of his fiction, it revolves around a gallery of grotesque characters motivated by the basest urges. The novel's central figure is Blondy Niles, a down-and-out boxer who exists at the very fringes of society. The garish nighttime world of bars and prostitutes, con men and petty crimes is the milieu in which he moves. When he is approached by Salty Banks to be an unwitting fall guy in a rigged boxing scheme, a calamitous chain of events is set in motion, and death is the inevitable result. Blondy is befriended by a good-hearted prostitute, Louise, but then comes under the powerful, mysterious spell of the gruesome Mrs. Boxx, an enormous, soulless woman who lures him to her house, which has been converted into the most primitive of abortion mills. Despite the terrible acts Mrs. Boxx oversees and that Blondy is compelled to participate in, he inexplicably finds himself unable - or unwilling - to leave this chamber of horror. Only with the help of Dorothy, Mrs. Boxx's younger, daughter, does he finally free himself from the clutches of this demonic, madwoman. Yet freedom proves elusive, for by the end of this surreal, phantasmagoric adventure, Blondy and everyone he cares for have come to a bloody end. Caldwell himself likened Poor Fool to a "diabolical dream." Written early in his career, it foreshadows many of the themes that were to characterize his later novels.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

This early Caldwell novel about a boxer on the skids is one of four new entries in LSU's Voices of the South reprints series which also features The Last of the Southern Girls by Willie Morris, $11.95 -1956-3; Band of Angels by Robert Penn Warren, $12.95 -1946-6; and The Morning and the Evening by Joan Williams, $11.95 -1955-5).

Library Journal