Waiting Period

The Demon A major American author of a stature with William Burroughs and Joseph Heller.?Los Angeles TimesHarry White is a man haunted by a satyr's lust and an obsessive need for sin and retribution. The more Harry succeeds - a good marriage, a good corporate job - the more desperate he be...	Room Secluded in his remand cell, a small-time petty criminal surrenders himself to the sadistic fantasies of hatred, rage and the powerless lust for revenge that are trapped inside him. Selby's second novel, the sequel to Last Exit To Brooklyn, is a claustrophobic descent into a man...	Last Exit to Brooklyn (An Evergreen Book) The first novel to articulate the rage and pain of life in "the other America," Last Exit to Brooklyn is a classic of postwar American writing. Selby's searing portrait of the powerless, the homeless, the dispossessed, is a fiercely and frighteningly apposite today as when it was...	The Willow Tree "A major American novelist of a stature with William Burroughs and Joseph Heller."-Los Angeles Times Bobby is young and black. Barely a teenager, he is old beyond his years. The best thing in Bobby's life is Maria, his Hispanic girlfriend. However, their lives are irrevoca...	Song of the Silent Snow Hubert Selby is probably one of the six best novelists writing in the English language.?Financial TimesAuthor of controversial cult classic, Last Exit to Brooklyn, Hubert Selby began as a writer of short fiction. He excels in this form, plunging the reader head-first into the den...
Requiem for a Dream: A Novel In this searing novel first published in 1978, two young hoods, Harry and Tyrone, and a girlfriend fantasize about scoring a pound of heroin and getting rich. But their heroin habit gets the better of them, and Harry's mother's addiction to diet pills lands her in a state mental hospital.	Hubert Selby Jr: It/ll Be Better Tomorrow One of the greatest American writers of the 20th century is duly honored in Hubert Selby Jr: It/ll Be Better Tomorrow, an exceptionally well-made documentary that does ample justice to Selby's literary legacy. The film's title indicates the respect that codirectors Michael W. Dea...	Last Exit to Brooklyn SUMMARY: Set in Brooklyn during the 1950s against a backdrop of union corruption and violence. A prostitute falls in love with one of her customers. Also a disturbed man discovers that he is homosexual. [IMDB - Mark Logan] REVIEW: In 1952, a panoramic view of the other side o...	Fight Club: A Novel The first rule about fight club is you don't talk about fight club.Chuck Palahniuk's outrageous and startling debut novel that exploded American literature and spawned a movement. Every weekend, in the basements and parking lots of bars across the country, young men with white-co...	Ham on Rye: A Novel In what is widely hailed as the best of his many novels, Charles Bukowski details the long, lonely years of his own hardscrabble youth in the raw voice of alter ego Henry Chinaski. From a harrowingly cheerless childhood in Germany through acne-riddled high school years and his a...

Selby's done better, but it's not a waste of time
I would suggest you read about every other Selby book before you choose this one, but on it's own, it's still decent. It reminded me of George Carlin in one of his nihilistic rants. Sure it rambles like hell, but if you skip a little here and there, it's pretty entertaining and funny.

Dull and silly and pretentious and pointless
It's not a good book- although at times there is a nice build up of tension and suspense.... But the thing that really annoyed me was why does Selby persist in not using punctuation, why is the second voice is so benign and forgiving and why is the man, our hero, so cowardly and weasely. The thing that really took me to task is that the "hero" is a Vietnam veteran- or so I assume, the first victim being a VA administrator who hasn't given our boy his dues. All the other reviewers seem to have this impression also. So why, when our boy goes to the gun store does he not know about a safety catch, It doesn't work, I can't pull it back. You got the safety on. Safety? Yeah. Haha, you really are a novice. And- Oh it's heavy. I had no idea handguns were so heavy. And then later we have some internal dialogue from our main man- But first Ive got to do what that guy said and go to a range and get familiar with it. Learn to shoot it and take it apart and clean it and all that. In the army those guys learn how to take their weapons apart blindfolded... Those guys? I thought he was a veteran. The reason why this point irks me so, is that I thought it was the clue to the man having a schizophrenic state of mind and that that the VA administrator was innocent and that he was the guilty party, he merely imagining that he was a veteran. This would have been a twist to the plot it would have been something to tax the mind and make us think about our self perceptions and values. Instead we got a simple dull path of selfish actions, that our boy's machismo justifies, only brightened by my waiting for the explanation for his confused thinking... which never came. In fact the more that I think about this- the worse it gets. Can you imagine spending years between books and making such a mistake. An awful, self pitying, self righteous book, that is poorly written.

Waiting For Justice
I discovered this book after learning that Herbert Selby jnr. the author of this was the same mind behind the script for Requiem for a Dream, a recent film about drug addiction. I hadn't seen Requiem at the time, but from what I had saw and heard of it I was quite intrigued to know more about the mind behind it. This was what brought me to The Waiting Period, probably Selby's latest. The opening line reads from the mind of our main character Horatio saying; "but I suppose it could best be done with a pack of sleeping pills." Or something. And by "done" he meant death. To kill himself I gather. Other thoughts are like; "what if when I slash one wrist, and I am only half conscious enough not to be able to cut the other properly?" Or "what if the razor slips and I half to find it?" This kind of thing. I at first thought it easy to label this book a typical American expose on the nothingness of life, but I think this book asked me for more. I don't believe that the author wanted the main character in this book; name, sex or job to be that important to us, but what he is looking for which we all do and that is a purpose to live. He is waiting so to speak on this purpose. This purpose to live. Which echoes what Sara G, a character in Requiem said when she told her son Harry that she needed "a reason to wash the dishes everyday." This is what he is waiting for "a reason," when he buys the gun and this is what he is against when he starts to question everything from why to get up in the morning to what should he do next. Maybe a shower? Fortunately or unfortunately depending on how you look at it he finally decides that there are people out there who deserve to die and not himself. Sparing whom he sees as innocents at the same time respecting equal rights of women to bear the same consequences that men do he sets on this mission to sting the targets he has made, people who live off others misery. This becomes more than a reason but a fixation. And with this the book runs, and runs and runs. Spoken mainly from inside the mind of the main character this book reads with no chapters and barely any characters to explore. Maybe there is something about the author's reputation which let his publishers give us this book with no chapter reference point or exact grammatical punctuation. I found myself waiting for justice to be served that perhaps things will catch up with our main character but readers will find that they may have to wait... and wait and wait....

a decent, entertaining book
No, it's not Selby's best book--I doubt that he intended it as his masterpiece. It's also true that the style has changed little since *Last Exit to Brooklyn*, with its stylized paragraph indentations, idiosyncratic punctuation, and phonetic spellings, and I agree that such conventions seem to work best in the world of *Last Exit*. Perhaps if it had been longer, it would have been a bit much, but I considered it a fun read. This short novel functions well as a portrait of an angry old man, crushed by bureaucracy, in a world whose very bureaucracy serves to impose the "waiting period" during which he "realizes" the "meaning" of his life--to kill the fat-cats whom he perceives are holding him down. I though it was, at the very least, Selby's funniest book (albeit in a twisted way) and definitely worth the time spent to read it.

Only worthwhile because of Selby's egregious style.
Being an admirer of Selby's i was dissapointed with this book. It wouldnt be unfair to say that the "Waiting Period" is probably best meant for Selby's more dedicated fans. It's an excellent idea that this novel is based on, one that should have served for a terrific platform for Selby to unleash his relentless narrative style as well as his unique mind but this simply fails to be the case. As Selby lets us live into the mind of a veteran soldier turned killer and allows us to be privy to all his sinister thoughts and evil plotting as he plans and schemes about his victims it seems initially that this will be an immensely gripping book. And it is for a while too. But because this is basically a silent monologue it doesnt keep you hostage for too long. The story becomes too mono-dimensional and as the variables do not change and no other characters are introduced except for the killer himself it starts loosening its grip until you're 3/4s into the book and you're basically forcing yourself to read on. That's still remarkable in itself because i dont see how any other author could keep you reading for as far as that with an idea as underdeveloped as that. But that's Selby and his way of laying out a bizzare and abysmally dark narrative in every book he's brought forth. This narrative of his is the only thing memorable here though. If you are not familar with this outstanding author start with his classic "Last exit to Brooklyn". If you do i can easily see how you might be tempted to read "Waiting Period". It still holds together enough for a good dark novel. But without the fanship factor it loses much of its appeal.