Eldorado Red and King Maker

[seekingferret.livejournal.com]

Two very, very different takes on the ghetto novel. It probably goes without saying, but both these novels should carry warnings for omnipresent rape, violence, and drug abuse.

15) Eldorado Red by Donald Goines

Apparently a classic example of a 1970s street novel. Eldorado Red runs a numbers game. He's on the top of the world, with women all around him, plenty of money, and people who do whatever he tells them to. His son Buddy apprentices to Red while planning revenge for Eldorado Red having abandoned his mother. And that's when things start taking a turn for the worse for Eldorado Red.

A cast of absurd gangsters and druggies and hitmen populate the lively streets of the story and Goines keeps the action moving with a brilliant sense of plotting. It's a classic pulp story, nothing of any redeeming literary value about it but extremely entertaining.


16 King Maker by Maurice Broaddus

This is the story of King Arthur, recast as an Indianapolis gang war. It is incredibly bad and incredibly hilarious. King's 'Knights" include Wayne, a counselor with a Church ministry; Lott, a low end Fedex employee; Percy, the mentally damaged, simple son of a crackwhore; Lady G, a runaway high school dropout who likes to scrap. King is mentored by Merle, a homeless white guy who talks to his squirrel, Sir Rupert. Their enemies include Dred, King's half-brother sorceror and major Indianapolis gang leader and Green, apparently a reincarnation of the Green Knight, with all sorts of vegetable elemental powers. The book ends with King killing a dragon in a slum basement with his Caliburns, custom-made, gold-plated automatic pistols.

I cannot wait to read the sequel even though I kept covering my eyes in horror as I read.



tags: african-american, sff, drama, pulp, a: broaddus maurice, a: goines donald