The Best Novel You’ll Ever Read About Cockfighting

Probably the Only One, Too. But Don’t Miss Charles Willeford’s 1972 Underground Classic, ‘Cockfighter’

I don’t remember where I first saw it—on some list of offbeat, oddball, underloved titles. But it stood out like a sore something. A native Californian, I’ve long been drawn to the grotesque and gothic of Southern fiction. Charles Willeford’s 1972 novel Cockfighter possessed all the basics: lost inheritance, family drama, alienation, doomed love, reveng…