Screamin' Jay Hawkins' All-Time Greatest Hits : A Novel

He came onstage in a coffin carried by pallbearers, with a bone clamped to his nose and a staff topped with a human skull. Offstage, he insisted that he'd been raised by a tribe of Blackfoot Indians, that he'd defeated the boxing champion of Alaska, that he'd fathered seventy-five illegitimate children. The R&B wild man Screamin' Jay Hawkins only had a single hit--the classic "I Put a Spell on You"--and was often written off as a clownish novelty act. But his mythmaking was legendary. In this inventive retelling, Mark Binelli embraces the man and the legend to create a comic, tragic, fantastical portrait of this unlikeliest of protagonists. Hawkins saw his life as a riotous picaresque, and Screamin' Jay Hawkins' All-Time Greatest Hits does it justice, in a dazzling collage of hilarity and heartbreak.