John Saul takes his readers deep into the bowels of New York's deepest and nastiest tunnels. The Big Apple's homeless population has been mostly denied access to their normal above-ground haunts and find refuge in the darkest and unmapped passageways far below the city's subway and utility tunnels. Being at the wrong place at the wrong time has resulted in the conviction and expulsion from society of the story's heroin and he ends up hidden away in subterranean despair. His dark plight is intensified by a surprising cast of prominent New York residents and homeless denizens of the tunnels making his bleak situation appear even more hopeless. Wicked twists and turns with harrowing efforts to save him make this a compelling and nightmarish read.

Falsely convicted of a brutal crime, college student Jeff Converse sees his future vanishing before his eyes. But someone has other plans for Jeff, in a place far deadlier than any penitentiary. Jeff finds himself beneath the teeming streets of Manhattan, in a hidden landscape of twisting tunnels and forgotten subterranian chambers. Here, an invisible population of the homeless, the desperate, and the mad has carved out its own shadow society. But they are not alone. For someone has made this forsaken civilization a private killing ground. Now, with no weapon but his wits, and an unimaginable threat lurking around every dark corner Jeff must somehow move heaven and earth to escape from a living hell...
I couldn't put this book down

I am a huge John Saul fan, but this book just didn’t live up to the others I have read. I didn’t feel any real sense of attachment to the main character - and while he was truly a victim - it was hard to get into the story. It was still well thought out and planned, but the first 2/3 of the book seemed to move super slow and only the last 90 pages or so really got going.

I have never read this author before and I like the imagination of the book. It made good use of the tunnels under NYC. However, it ended abruptly and, in some places, spent more time describing the tunnel rather than the character or the situation. it was disjointed. I am glad I read it but....

A really solid crime thriller with some classist undertones. Focuses a lot on the treatment of the homeless and humanizes them, wanted a little more punch at the end but otherwise this was a uptempo page turner that kept me reading.

Probably one of the best books I've read. Hunting criminals under NYC as a sport was terrifying. It really makes you think about how dispensable criminals are looked at. Highly recommend this book!

"There Were People You Kept Waiting, and People You Didn't":
Class Hierarchies as Revealed Under Duress
in John Saul's The Manhattan Hunt Club

Christopher Snyder
April 5, 2013
Little Red Schoolhouse
(undergrad vers.)
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- 1 -

¶ Published the month before the attacks on the Twin Towers,

John Saul's The Manhattan Hunt Club (2001) uses the

potboiler structure to give the reader a guided tour of the

echelons of power — from top to bottom — that would only be

“encounterable” in a state of constant emergency (which is

to say: under the tension most “thrillers” aspire to provide).

Given that the novel is a National Bestseller with claims to

socioeconomic criticism on a par with Dickens, Hugo, and the

American Social Realists, one would expect critical acclaim

to be more forthcoming that it, perhaps, has been (which,

perhaps inarguably, leaves the U.S. with a widely-read,

proletariat-cum-bourgeois “fan base” who are better appraised

of the social schemata than anyone, save themselves, are

aware!).

¶ Nonetheless, what one finds on encountering the novel is a

carefully-planned — one is reticent to simply say, “carefully

plotted” — x- and y-axis drawn from the map(s) of post-

millenial, barely-internetted N.Y.C. replete with overlapping

failures of social order, from the judge whose “own satisfaction

in his judgments had been diluted, and then washed completely

away by the steady trickle of decisions from the courts above

him” to the Ivy League college student whose good deed ends up

setting the plot in motion to the people “below ground” who

have to make their own subdistinctions about the company

they keep.

¶ In none of these cases is anything less than day-to-day

survival at stake: the people may be trapped by their routines,

but it's the only routines they know. It is only under the

guise of a “thriller” that Saul could dare to show us how

dim the chances are, in practice, of breaking beyond the

rim of one's personal horizon: “They knew that people in their

position never discussed their true desires in public … The

truth, always, was reserved for intimate conversations in the

most private of settings.”

¶ In these sorts of circumstances, the odds of the Truth

getting aired, maintained, or even validated to begin with

are dim at best: these people, with more power than 99%

of the population of the city they “rule” could imagine

of being possible to wield, are as constantly protective of

their own backs and place in the pecking order as the street

denizens Saul's hero Jeff Converse falls in amongst

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- 2 -

with: “You don't look at people, they won't look at you. You

don't talk, they won't talk. An' if you just keep walkin',

they transit cops won't even bother you.”

¶ Already, the possibilities are dimmed to a dull resignation

of one sort or another: it is precisely between the unknowing

hopefulness of the child and the seen-too-much-to-kid-oneself

“maturity” of most adults (in the novel, and thus, begging the

question, in the macrocosm outside it) that Saul places

his still-hopeful college student in the “protagonist” role of

his work, a bildungsroman of opportunities available, not

opportunities hypothetical: “Whatever Jeff expected as he

stepped through the door, it wasn't this.” Even in the incidental

references, down to the minutiae of what the characters come

across, Saul is careful to frame it in terms of how they,

inwardly, approach the situation — in other words, “where”

they came “from.”

¶ “And always the homeless”: like the mind-chatter of the hive

mind of culture & commerce residing above, the situation of

cast-offs is revealed to be endemic, a collateral damage of

progress, as much an inevitability of a healthy ecosystem as

the “parasites” of the well-known aphorism: with only so many

opportunities to go around, they are only so many choices

available, as well.
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B-

Christopher: on the one hand, the scope of the ideas you're trying to put across in the first two paragraphs — certainly more admirable than a dearth — beggar your ability to ably find an apt quote from the text to cover them all. On the other hand, stick to the "one citation per paragraph" rule: you'll find it delimits the argument YOU want to make, not the other way around. Sound clear? As it is, this paper somehow manages to feel both a wee bit short and, at the same time, as though it would be better served if expanded to ten pages — or , alternately, three others of commensurate length. Make sense?

Still, though: this is part of the process, wrestling through your ideas to come up with a single, tangible thesis, one with backbone. My comments above, befitting the purpose of this class, were not meant to "discourage" you: it is simply a process we all have to go through, of vetting our best ideas to come up with even better ones, that I am trying to impart.

And . . . you certainly have no shortage of those! Keep wrestling!

Johnson de Johnson
Prof. Emeritus, Eng. Lang & Lit.
Univ. of Chicago

Solid story with some interesting twists. This was my first foray with Saul, and I would certainly return for more! He paces suspenseful moments almost through the eyes of a director; jumping back and forth between perspectives and characters with just enough to bring them forward and rip you along for the gripping ride.
Well done, Saul... This one had me through to the end!

The Manhattan Hunt Club was yet another unstoppable and incredible novel by John Saul. It reminded me a lot of novels like the Long Walk or In the Dark. I have always greatly enjoyed novels where the characters have to go through some kind of game that they are playing in order to win their lives. In this novel, Jeff, tone of the protagonists, is falsely accused of brutally raping a woman in New York. Later, as he is being transfered to another prison, the van he is in is attacked and he is taken from the wreckage of it. He is taken deep into the unused tunnels below Manhattan and told that if he makes it to the surface alive, he can go free because they made it look like he died in the accident. He would be an entirely free man if he could get out, but he is being hunted by men who get a thrill out of hunting people like game. This is a novel that you can't put down. It is the most vulgar Saul novel I've ever read as well. There is one of the most disturbing sex scenes I've ever read in it, as well as one of the most aweful ways for a person to die. It's a great novel and I'd recommend it to anyone, but especially fans of horror.

Wow! Interesting plot. Thought I had it figured out but missed the BIG plot turn. Would read more from this author.

Interesante argumento. A los declarados culpables por lo tribunales con sentencia definitiva por cometer crímenes aberrantes, se los hace desaparecer simulando accidentes y se los suelta en los túneles subterráneos de New York como si fuera un coto de caza, donde un grupo de poderosos millonarios saldrá a cazarlos. Como es de esperar, que pasa cuando hay alguien injustamente condenado.
Posee acción suficiente y personajes como para enganchar hasta las ultimas paginas. Mas allá de los entretenido que es, lo mas acertado es el estudio que hace de los personajes marginales que viven en las calles y a la noche buscan refugio en los túneles donde se sienten mas protegidos.
Es impresionante ver los códigos que manejan los sintecho en el inframundo. El resentimiento hacia la gente de la superficie, por la indiferencia que suelen mostrar hacia ellos, como los utilizan las autoridades para obtener información, y lo que ellos consideran permitido y lo que no.
John Saul es un escritor un poco olvidado, los libros que conseguí de el son ediciones viejas, quizás no haber tenido un libro bestseller, impactante del que se haya hecho una película y se volviera un clásico lo relego a los márgenes, pero todas sus obras son a tener en cuenta.

This was an entertaining read. Although there were a few obvious plot points, there were also a few unexpected twists that kept it interesting. Overall, a suspenseful and gripping tale. I was particularly enthralled with the details revolving around the transient population and the subterranean citizens. Definately worth the reading time.