Publisher's Synopsis
Dark humour just got darker. Watching is the highest achievement to date of an acknowledged Memphis master, John Fergus Ryan. Set in Times Square and Hell's Kitchen rather than the South, it represents a stark departure from the author's usual humour. Watching is an ode to life-as-lived; bleak, funny, and devastating. What begins as a matter-of-fact descriptive account of the sleaze palaces around Times Square gathers force, page by page, builds to a torrent of redemptive poetry -- from bleak material indeed. From the efficiency apartments and single-occupancy hotels of Hell's Kitchen in midtown Manhattan, a group of pensioners and marginal men venture into the night to pursue their yearnings. Billy 'the Gimp', a stoic pensioner who lives for the peep shows in Times Square, those 'sticky-footed temples of enlightenment', describes life in the raw, as it surrounds him, in all its comic horror. Like the graffiti of ruined Pompeii, Billy's deadpan tale is the record of a civilisation -- ours.
