Eric Priestley

Sloppy editing and proofreading irritated me the whole way through this novel. Although some readers might think that the typos in the text are examples of Ebonics or L.A. black gangster vernacular, there are too many instances where this just can’t be the case, such as in the misspelling of a name (Kadera/ Kadedra p. 20) or the substitution of a simple word like “is” for “his.” Even granting that all the verb tense irregularities might be natural to the vernacular (and I don’t think that this is true), many typos just can’t be explained away.
I had high hopes for this novel, none of which were fulfilled. I didn’t meet any fresh, unexpected characters or learn anything new. The inclusion of a disembodied 15,000 year old African spirit seeking a modern human body to enter so as to regain his mortality, find the severed hand of a demon spirit Creature, and then go on to complete a normal life cycle of mating and parenting does not change my opinion. Other writers have referenced such juju spirits in more interesting and inventive ways. In fact, perhaps I should thank this author for giving me an excuse to put Wayde Compton’s Performance Bond and Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo on my to-be-re-read-in-the-near-future list.
That said, the last quarter of the book, wherein the author gets down to fulfillment of the above quest and some righteous surpranatural rumbling, is the most accomplished. The bulk of the novel prior to this point, however, is just a lot of gangster violence, gangster slang and gangster sad, all played out by some rather thinly realized characters. The world of For Keeps is a hermetic one where children are recruited from their grammar and junior high school schoolyards to become drug dealers and bank robbers for slightly older & more-hardened criminals, who in turn are in debt to and kept in line by again older and increasingly more ruthless gangsters. It’s a predatory food chain kept afloat on cars, guns, fear, money, drugs & sex, all of which function as both carrot and stick to keep the minions in line. Every kid is a wanna be in this world, want to be slick, want to be cool, want to be down. Any counter force is virtually non-existent and those that are engaged at all, such as Martha, the mother of Prebo and Kanisha, are very weak. Cops here are cops, not social workers. Teachers are mostly absent, and when present, seem to have influence only on the very young. If the lives without options of these kids resemble anything it may be the similar No Exit lives of the child-soldiers/ slaves, particularly, but not exclusively, in Africa. In fact, the disembodied spirit who observes all the goings on in the neighborhood explicitly refers to the kids as “slaves” of the older gangsters. One of the local top-dog gangsters, Blowy (rap record producer in the straight world), keeps a fish tank filled with piranhas to which he feeds goldfish. The fish tank is of course a metaphor for the neighborhood where the big fish eat the little fish in a feeding frenzy.
The outcome of this story is pretty predictable, with the added dimension of a full-on tear in the fabric of time caused by demon spirits, the creation of a vortex that threatens to suck up all the world. This temporary and reversible cataclysm seemingly coincides with a couple of high-on-the-Richter-scale earthquakes in L.A (time frame of the novel is a bit ambiguous with references both to rappers such as Snoop Dog as well as Patty Hearst and the SLA). Now, I liked this dimension of the novel and might have liked the novel more if the author had summoned the spirits more frequently and more creatively throughout. At the end of the novel, we are left with a moral not dissimilar to that with which Charles Johnson leaves us at the end of his much better novel Middle Passage. The ancient African spirit now fully inhabits the body of contemporary gangster Eddie Stokes. He's living in a spacious and sunny apartment with the former albino, now gorgeously bronze and pregnant Sunshine (also a former gangster and daughter of Cora, a Franco-African Native American juju practitioner from New Orleans). He awaits the birth of his first child and takes the first steps toward trying to rescue/ father one of the remaining band of child gangsters, the youngest among them.

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