Publisher's Synopsis
"Charles Gorham has written a masterpiece. It is a remarkable tour-de-force in character study that will stick in one's mind for a long time. But it is not for the squeamish." Chicago Tribune
Mattie Dolan is a clever and ambitious, 19-year-old sociopath, back from WWII and striving in the backstreets, tenements and dark alleys of New York to rise above the squalor that shaped him... and conquer the city. He does it with casual violence, brutal sex, and by shrewdly manipulating others to commit crimes and other horrors for him. Along the way, he ruthlessly reveals the seething darkness that lurks behind the vast city's many deceptive guises, each a mirror-image of his own pitiless soul. "The expertness of Mr. Gorham's writing is evident on every page. A study of juvenile delinquency and its final flowering, makes its points in the crudest and most violent terms. One believes everything this doomed young destroyer of society does and says." New York Times "An unforgivable book. Censor bait." Kirkus Reviews
