The Blood of the Lamb: A Novel
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Overview
This autobiographical novel of family tragedy by the author of Slouching Towards Kalamazoo “moves deftly from manic hilarity to manic fury, and back again” (Newsday).
The most poignant of Peter De Vries’s novels, The Blood of the Lamb is also his most personal. It follows the life of Don Wanderhop from his childhood in an immigrant Calvinist family living in Chicago in the 1950s through the loss of a brother, his faith, his wife, and finally his daughter—a tragedy drawn directly from De Vries’s own life.
Despite its basis in personal tragedy, The Blood of the Lamb offers glimpses of the comic sensibility for which De Vries was famous. Written with a powerful blend of grief, love, wit, and fury, De Vries’s “sensitive treatment of the death of a beloved child it has scarcely a superior in contemporary fiction" (Chicago Tribune).
The most poignant of Peter De Vries’s novels, The Blood of the Lamb is also his most personal. It follows the life of Don Wanderhop from his childhood in an immigrant Calvinist family living in Chicago in the 1950s through the loss of a brother, his faith, his wife, and finally his daughter—a tragedy drawn directly from De Vries’s own life.
Despite its basis in personal tragedy, The Blood of the Lamb offers glimpses of the comic sensibility for which De Vries was famous. Written with a powerful blend of grief, love, wit, and fury, De Vries’s “sensitive treatment of the death of a beloved child it has scarcely a superior in contemporary fiction" (Chicago Tribune).
- Title: The Blood of the Lamb: A Novel
- Authors: Peter De Vries, Jefferey Frank
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Print Publication Date: 2020
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 258
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9780226149172, 9780226143880, 0226143880, 022614917X
- Resource ID: LLS:9780226149172
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-21T18:30:18Z
Peter De Vries (1910–1993), the man responsible for contributing to the cultural vernacular such witticisms as "Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be" and "Deep down, he’s shallow," was, according to Kingsley Amis, "the funniest serious writer to be found on either side of the Atlantic." But De Vries’s life and work was informed as much by sorrow as by wit.