The New York Times Book Review - Marc Bojanowski
…an excellent and terse account of a devastating mine fire in Idaho in 1972…Canty keeps his descriptions to a minimum, depending instead on taut stretches of introspection and screenplay-ready dialogue to reveal characters acting against their own best interests…Whether in his portrait of the young woman stacking cans of pumpkin pie filling when news of the accident comes, or the divorced miner scrubbing himself clean of arsenic and creosote grime in a hot shower the morning after a long night shift, Canty honors labor and thoughtfully challenges the commitment the townspeople make to the thing that is so clearly ruining them.
San Francisco Chronicle
"If you haven't spent an evening or two in the grand company of Kevin Canty's work, now is your time to start…Canty's chosen genre is fiction, but he peddles truth."
Dan Chaon
"[Canty] is one of my favorite contemporary writers because of his amazing gift for character and image…The Underworld is among his best work. Brutal and delicate, hilarious and totally heartbreaking. Like Charon, Canty makes a great ferryman into uncharted territory."
William Kittredge
"A dead-honest encounter with the hearts and minds of working-class America, The Underworld stands there beside Island by Alistair Macleod and A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin and damned near anything you might think of by Raymond Carver."
BookPage
"Canty’s care with prose recalls Raymond Carver, and his empathy for the common man extends a bloodline that reaches back to the likes of John Steinbeck and William Saroyan…Canty has a gift for turning the commonplace into the extraordinary by asking the right questions and allowing the truth to unfold."
Deborah Reed
"The Underworld pierces with busted hearts, broken families, and the gristly days of work and drink that bind them. A lovely, melodic, and unsparing look at small-town life in the West."
New York Times Book Review
"An excellent and terse account of a devastating mine fire in Idaho in 1972…taut stretches of introspection and screenplay-ready dialogue [reveal] characters acting against their own best interests…Canty honors labor and thoughtfully challenges the commitment the townspeople make to the thing that is so clearly ruining them."
Seattle Times
"Canty’s real genius lies in his subtly drawn depiction of the emotional and psychological landscape of this 'big incomprehensible thing.'"
Booklist
"[P]olished, deeply empathetic…Canty’s controlled, spare prose provides an ideal vehicle for excavating these emotional depths…His sculpted, lapidarian cadence deftly navigates the terrain separating numbness and pain…to illuminate the fragility and preciousness of life."
