Upside-down off a camel? Excuse me?

Or how about “God up a dog’s ass of a flooding.” You or I might have said, “Oh, my god, what a flooding.”

If the way the characters in Purple Jesus talk and think isn’t fascinating enough, the book also is the best explanation—illumination—I’ve seen of how some modern-life tragedies come into being, the kinds of fatal tragedies that leave all of us gawking at the TV news and saying, “Why would anyone do that? What was he thinking?” For my review of Purple Jesus in the blogzine Late Last Night Books, go to http://latelastnightbooks.com/

Photo by Tiia Monto, Camel in Simferopol zoo, wikimediacommons.org/