They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

The Great Depression led people to take desperate measures to survive. The marathon dance craze, which flourished at that time, seemed a simple way for people to earn extra money, dancing the hours away for cash, for weeks at a time.

But the underside of that craze was a competition and violence unknown to most ballrooms. A lurid tale of dancing and desperation, Horace McCoy's classic American novel captures the dark side of the 1930s.

An extraordinary achievement and every bit as shocking and moving today as it must have been for its original readers. The characters are both more, and less, than human, the writing is tersely perfect, and the ending almost unbearably moving. Guardian
The first existentialist novel to have appeared in America -- Simone de Beauvoir
A classic novel about hardscrabble survival in 1930s Depression-era America The Times
A heartbreaking existentialist fable about a gruelling marathon dance contest [that] assumes the weight of Greek tragedy ... a masterpiece. Independent on Sunday
Sordid, pathetic, senselessly exciting ... has the immediacy and the significance of a nerve-shattering explosion New Republic
Were it not in its physical details so carefully documented, it would be lurid beyond itself Nation
Language is not minced in this short novel which presents life in its most brutal aspect Saturday Review of Literature
A brilliant, bitter, wonderful portrait of mother and daughter, artist and lover Kirkus
Horace McCoy shoots words like bullets Time
A spare, bleak parable about American life, which McCoy pictured as a Los Angeles dance marathon in the early thirties ... full of the kind of apocalyptic detail that both he and Nathanael West saw in life as lived on the Hollywood fringe New York Times
Captures the survivalist barbarity in this bizarre convention, and becomes a metaphor for life itself: the last couple on their feet gets the prize Independent
I was moved, then shaken by the beauty and genius of Horace McCoy's metaphor Village Voice
It's the unanswerable nature of the whydunnit that ensures the book's durability booklit.com
Takes the reader into one of America's darkest corners ... The story has resonance for contemporary America and the current craze for reality television. How far are we from staging a dance marathon for television? readywhenyouarecb.com
This almost sadistically frank pulp fiction from 1935 will cure anyone of the delusion that earlier generations didn't know the score. With murder, incest, abortion, and the like generously added to a plot about people entertaining themselves by watching the misery of others, it's like one of these eliminationist "reality" television shows (Survivor, Big Brother, etc.) as conceived by the creative team of Thomas Hobbes and Charles Darwin. These lives are indeed nasty, brutish, and short. It doesn't make for a pretty story, but you have to admire the zeal and energy with which Horace McCoy drives his point home Brothersjudd.com
A sharply-honed novella... Brilliant -- Val Hennessy Daily Mail
America's first existential novel Evening Standard
And finally, showing the modern writers how it's done... the 1930s existentialist noir classic... it's a breathtaking piece of storytelling that is still thrillingly relevant today. -- Doug Johnstone Big Issue
The brutality of the story is offset by the poetic beauty and precision of the narrative... In our world of fleeting reality TV stardom, this stark, urgent novel feels more timely than ever. -- Anita Sethi Observer

Horace McCoy was born near Nashville, Tennessee in 1897. His varied career included reporting and sports editing, acting as bodyguard to a politician, doubling for a wrestler and writing for films and magazines. A founder of the celebrated Dallas Little Theatre, his novels include I Should Have Stayed Home and Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye. He died in 1955.

The Great Depression led people to take desperate measures to survive. The marathon dance craze, which flourished at that time, seemed a simple way for people to earn extra money, dancing the hours away for cash, for weeks at a time. But the underside of that craze was a competition and violence unknown to most ballrooms. A lurid tale of dancing and desperation, Horace McCoy's classic American novel captures the dark side of the 1930s.

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