Mark Childress's novel, Tender, is a little more than just a fine novel; it is a big, all-American, Technicolor dreamboat of a book, as vital and as intense as anything I've read in the last ten years.  The legend is familiar to everyone who cares about pop music and rhythm and blues, but Mark Childress has invested it with an eerie mystery-train vitality that is only available to the talented novelist.

There's something else as well; this is the first novel I've ever read in my life which is more inside rock and roll than about it; through the eyes of Leroy Kirby, Mark Childress has made the mad early days of rock and roll seem not just comphrensible but inevitable.  Beneath the cool prose line of this minimalist epic there is the same raw and feverish drive that propelled the early rockabilly stars as they created a new kind of music. Childress's understanding and love of this new music lends Tender the sort of piney woods authenticity I associate with such American classics as Elmer Gantry and All The King's Men.  

If you care about rock and roll, Tender is going to knock your socks off.  This is a great novel, and as Childress documents the meteoric rise of his talented child-monster-prodigy, Leroy Kirby, he never misses a beat.

-- Stephen King