Brooklyn Owes the Charmer Under Mel tells the story of a decrepit hotel, now defunct, called the Resplendent, in what was then called the Borscht Belt in upstate New York's Sullivan County and of the small army of menial worker made up of drifters and students called "bimmies," who infested it in the summer of the first Woodstock Music Festival, 1969.
"Twenty-five year-old Cullen Ramakrishna Herskovits has written a mean and vicious, sexed-up Catch 22 set in a Twilight Zone where Last Exit to Brooklyn meets the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and a Catcher in the Rye with a juvenile delinquent Holden Caulfield as its protagonist.
This paradox of a novel somehow manages to strike visceral and existential paydirt on practically every page from cover to cover. You curse yourself for continuing to read this book, but you just can't help it."
-- Globe Literary Supplement
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