Harry Crews, Writer of Dark Fiction, Is Dead at 76 Harry Crews, whose novels out-Gothic Southern Gothic by conjuring a world of hard-drinking, punch-throwing, snake-oil-selling characters whose physical, mental, social and sexual deviations render them somehow entirely normal and eminently sympathetic, died on Wednesday at his home in Gainesville, Fla. He was 76. The cause was complications of neuropathy, his former wife, Sally Crews, said. Before retiring in the 1990s, Mr. Crews taught writing for many years at the University of Florida in Gainesville. A Georgia-born Rabelais, Mr. Crews was renowned for darkly comic, bitingly satirical, grotesquely populated and almost preternaturally violent novels. Though his books captivated many reviewers, they were not the stuff of best-seller lists, in part because they bewildered some readers and repelled others. But they attracted a cadre of fans so fiercely devoted that the phrase "cult following" seems inadequate to describe their ardor. Mr. Crews came to wide notice with his first novel, "The Gospel Singer," published in 1968. The book, about a traveling evangelist who meets a lurid fate in a Georgia town, features characters of the sort that would people his dozen later novels: sideshow freaks, an escaped lunatic and a sociopath or two. You don't intend to make a career out of midgets, do you? Mr. Crews's wife asked him early in his writing life. Indeed he did. Besides midgets, later novels feature a 600-pound man who consumes titanic quantities of the diet drink Metrecal ("Naked in Garden Hills," 1969); a woman who sings tenderly to her dead husband's skull ("Scar Lover," 1992); and, perhaps most famously, a man who eats an automobile - a 1971 Ford Maverick, to be exact - four ounces in a sitting ("Car," 1972). Alcohol loomed large in Mr. Crews's body of work, as it did for many years in his corporeal body. Once, on assignment for a magazine in Alaska - he wrote regular essays for Playboy and Esquire in the 1970s - he awoke after a liquid night to find himself in possession of a tattoo (a "hinge" inside his elbow) that he did not have before. Despite their teeming decadence, or more likely because of it, Mr. Crews's novels betray a fundamental empathy, chronicling his characters" search for meaning in a dissolute, end-stage world. His ability to spin out a dark, glittering thread from this tangle of souls gave him a singular voice that could make his prose riveting. "A Feast of Snakes" (1976), which concerns a town's obsessive annual ritual - a rattlesnake rodeo - and is considered by many critics to be his finest novel, opens this way: She felt the snake between her breasts, felt him there, and loved him there, coiled, the deep tumescent S held rigid, ready to strike. She loved the way the snake looked sewn onto her V-neck letter sweater, his hard diamondback pattern shining in the sun. It was unseasonably hot, almost sixty degrees, for early November in Mystic, Georgia, and she could smell the light musk of her own sweat. She liked the sweat, liked the way it felt, slick as oil, in all the joints of her body, her bones, in the firm sliding muscles, tensed and locked now, ready to spring - to strike - when the band behind her fired up the school song: "Fight On Deadly Rattlers of Old Mystic High." To critics who taxed him with sensationalism, Mr. Crews - a plainspoken ex-Marine, ex-boxer, ex-bouncer and ex-barker - replied, in effect, that it took decadence to lampoon decadence. His actual replies are largely unprintable. What was clear from his interviews, and grew clearer still with the publication of his acclaimed memoir, "A Childhood: The Biography of a Place" (1978), was that for freakish drama, deep tragedy and the blackest of black comedy, anything in Mr. Crews's fiction was resoundingly eclipsed by the facts of his own life. Harry Eugene Crews was born on June 7, 1935, in Alma, Ga., a rural community near the Okefenokee Swamp where, he later wrote, "there wasn't enough cash money in the county to close up a dead man's eyes." There was rarely enough to eat; local people supplemented their diet with clay for the minerals it contained. His father, Ray, a tenant farmer, died before Harry was 2. Not long afterward his mother, Myrtice, married Ray's brother, a violent alcoholic. "We lived on a series of tenant farms," Mr. Crews told The New York Times in 1978. The kinds of places where you could lay awake at night and look through the roof and see the stars and you could fish for chickens through the big wide cracks in the floor by tying a piece of tobacco twine to a fish hook. Young Harry loved stories, but there were few books to be had. Instead, his narrative gifts took root in the Sears Roebuck catalog. "Things were so awful in the house that I'd fantasize about the people in the catalog," he said in the same interview. They all looked so good and clean and perfect, and then I'd write little stories about them. When Harry was about 5, an illness, possibly polio, paralyzed his legs for a time, causing them to fold up behind him in unremitting spasm. A parade of family, faith healers and the merely curious passed before his sickbed, gawking, he later said, as if he were something in a carnival. About a year later, recovered from his illness, he fell into a cauldron of scalding water used to slough the skin off slaughtered hogs. It sloughed off his skin. Once more, he was bedridden. At 17, he joined the Marine Corps, serving three years. Afterward, on the G.I. Bill, he attended the University of Florida, where he studied with the noted Southern novelist Andrew Lytle. He earned a bachelor's degree in literature from the university in 1960, followed by a master's in education there. In early 1960 Mr. Crews married a classmate, Sally Ellis. They divorced at the end of 1961 but remarried the next year. They had two sons, one of whom, Patrick, died in a drowning accident at 4. The couple divorced again in 1972. Mr. Crews is survived by a son, Byron; a brother, Hoyett; and a grandson. His other books include the novels "The Hawk Is Dying" (1973), "The Gypsy's Curse" (1974), "The Knockout Artist" (1988) and "Celebration" (1998), as well as essay and short-story collections. For many years, as Mr. Crews openly discussed in interviews, alcohol was his anesthetic of choice. He stopped drinking in the late 1980s. "I had an ex-wife and I had an ex-kid and I had an ex-dog and I had an ex-house and I'm an ex-drunk," he told The Times in 2006. I've supported whores and dopers and drunks and bartenders. Thank God I don't do that anymore. Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.