In the Belly of the Beast

Jack Henry Abbott 1981

Devastation Rating

Existential Dread
prison trauma injustice literary fiction survival

Our Take

Letters from a man who had spent almost his entire life behind bars, and they read like dispatches from a country that shares a border with ours but operates on different physical laws. Abbott's violence is inseparable from the violence done to him, and that equation is the most uncomfortable thing the book delivers.

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