Sarah was great. I guess my experience differs from others in that I read The Heart is Deceitful first, then Sarah. So I got the back story before getting the main story. But for me after reading Heart, Sarah seemed almost like a comedy by comparison. Of course the characters are again reprehensible and really disgusting (the child molester with pictures of little girls all over walls, mumbling about his stepdaughter? yeeesh -- and that atrocious Le Loup!) but the work in general was so much brighter and funnier when held up next to Heart. Where Heart seemed all darkness except for the very ending chapter, Sarah had light and dark walking hand in hand throughout. Before reading either work my friends who had read Ms. Leroy told me about Sarah and called it "harrowing" but I felt Heart was much more so. The truck chase/rescue scene in Sarah is genius and wonderful, the whores who liberate Sam coming off as even heroic. Really racing to the finish with a Deliverance quality, escaping the hillbillys. Ms. Leroy gives the characters a kind of nobility that is missing from Heart, which was such an exquisitely written torture chamber. Pooh ("not like shit, like Pooh Bear") braving adversity and continous beatings while becoming the most famous ho in the state, her jealousy getting the best of her, but ultimately you see she's good inside and see she's really a tragic figure as she heads off to Hollywood. And the bond she shares with Sam, wanting fist kisses from Le Loup, their bargain basement Stanley Kowalski.
The whole Saint Sarah scenario is completely ludicrous and really, really funny while also depraved and sick!