They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (Serpent's Tail Classics) - Softcover

Sordid, pathetic, senselessly exciting ... has the immediacy and the significance of a nerve-shattering explosion (New Republic)

Were it not in its physical details so carefully documented, it would be lurid beyond itself (Nation)

Language is not minced in this short novel which presents life in its most brutal aspect (Saturday Review of Literature)

The first existentialist novel to have appeared in America (Simone de Beauvoir)

A brilliant, bitter, wonderful portrait of mother and daughter, artist and lover (Kirkus)

Horace McCoy shoots words like bullets (Time)

A spare, bleak parable about American life, which McCoy pictured as a Los Angeles dance marathon in the early thirties ... full of the kind of apocalyptic detail that both he and Nathanael West saw in life as lived on the Hollywood fringe (New York Times)

Captures the survivalist barbarity in this bizarre convention, and becomes a metaphor for life itself: the last couple on their feet gets the prize (Independent)

I was moved, then shaken by the beauty and genius of Horace McCoy's metaphor (Village Voice)

It's the unanswerable nature of the whydunnit that ensures the book's durability (booklit.com)

The Depression of the 1930s led people to desperate measures to survive. The marathon dance craze, which flourished at that time seemed a simple way for people to earn extra money dancing the hours away for cash, for weeks at a time. But the underside of that craze was filled with a competition and violence unknown to most ballrooms. A lurid tale of dancing and desperation: Horace McCoy's classic American novel captures the dark side of the 1930s.