The Cocaine Chronicles [Paperback]

Gary Phillips (Editor), Jervey Tervalon (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2005

Fiction. Nothing to snort at, this ambitious anthology of jaw-grinding criminal behavior is masterfully curated by acclaimed authors Phillips and Tervalon. The contributors to this anthology of cocaine-themed stories include Susan Straight, Ken Bruen, Donnell Alexander, Letrice Johnson and more. Gary Phillips is the author of several crime fiction novels, including Bangers. Jervey Tervalon is the author of several books, including the Los Angeles Times best seller Dead Above Ground.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

There are some strong entries in this depressing all-original anthology of 17 stories involving the always powerful, often destructive, effects of cocaine use. The editors call cocaine "the scourge of our times" in their introduction, and that judgment is evident whether the story is about a user, a dealer or someone simply caught up in someone else's thrall to the drug. Some tales offer a macabre sense of humor, such as Lee Child's "Ten Keys," in which a drug courier rips off a shipment, and Laura Lippman's "The Crack Cocaine Habit," in which two white girls venture into a bad neighborhood to make a buy. Children are the focus of Kerry E. West's shocking "Shame," about a kid who copes with her mother's habit and the world's indifference. Another child is the victim of her mother's habit in Nina Revoyr's highly effective "Golden Pacific." James Brown's sobering "The Screenwriter" details the rise and cocaine-induced fall of a screenwriter. Other contributors include editors Phillips and Tervalon, Ken Bruen, Bill Moody and Manuel Ramos. None of the stories glamorize cocaine, but some do exhibit what the editors call "scary charms." (Apr.)
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From the Publisher

The best fiction anthology of cocaine-themed tales to blow through in years, featuring ALL NEW stories by Susan Straight, Lee Child, Laura Lippman, Ken Bruen, Jerry Stahl, Nina Revoyr, Bill Moody, Emory Holmes II, James Brown, Gary Phillips, Jervey Tervalon, Kerry E. West, Donnell Alexander, Deborah Vankin, Robert Ward, Manuel Ramos, and Detrice Jones.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 250 pages
• Publisher: Akashic Books (April 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1888451750
• ISBN-13: 978-1888451757
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,445,694 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jervey Tervalon(fiction) was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, but moved to the Jefferson Park/Crenshaw area of Los Angeles, California, with his family as a young boy. He attended the University of California at Santa Barbara where he graduated with a BA in Literature. He received his MFA from UC Irvine where he studied with Thomas Keneally and Oakley Hall. His thesis project became the novel Understand This for which he won the 1994 New Voices Award from Quality Paper Books was based on his experiences teaching at Locke High School. He's had four novels and a collection of stories and two anthologies and numerous short stories, essays and articles published. His most current publication is "Golden: The Education of a Young Pootbutt,"in Slake Magazine, published in July 2010.

Literary L.A.
David L. Ulin
published: February 12, 1998

JERVEY TERVALON sold his first poem to Scholastic magazine while he was still in junior high school. "'My God,'" the Pasadena resident remembers thinking, "'I can make money at this.' And I've been deluded ever since." Raised in Los Angeles, he attended Dorsey High School and UC Santa Barbara, where he wrote stories about his neighborhood, publishing them in "little magazines that no one reads." After graduation, Tervalon taught at Locke High School before entering the MFA program at UC Irvine; there, he returned to a work in progress about South-Central that ultimately became his first novel, Understand This. Although the book won a Quality Paperback Book Club New Voices Award in 1994, Tervalon has been stymied in his attempts to publish subsequent work - his second novel was bought but never issued, and a third book is circulating now. "Most publishers," he says, "feel like they can't lose money underestimating the intelligence of the black reader, and there's no one out there to balance their preconceptions, and prove they're wrong. It's especially hard coming from Los Angeles,

Honors, Awards: Disney Screen-writing Fellow, 1992; Quality Paper Book Club's New Voices Award, 1994; Finalist, Discover New Writers/Barnes and Noble Award, 1994; Honorable Mention, Pushcart Prize, 1996; Gold Crown Award from the Pasadena Arts Council, Remsen Bird Artist in Residence, 2001;. Josephine Miles National Literary Award for Excellence in Multicultural Literature, 2001; California Arts Fellowship, 2003.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars nicely assembled anthology...., March 21, 2005

By 

Felicia Sullivan (New York, ny United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Cocaine Chronicles (Paperback)

From the introduction of The Cocaine Chronicles, editors Gary Phillips and Jervery Tervalon claim that they are "observers of the human condition in its various physical and psychological permutations". They were intrigued by this project as no one has ever broached an anthology on a drug that has been prevalent in our society for well over a century with its hey days in the 1920's and 1980's - decades that celebrated excess. In this bold anthology, we meet the casual sniffers, the heavy users, the dealers, the victims and the unsuspecting victims on both sides of the coast - hysterical romps, tragic characters and unfathomable lows - rendering cocaine a drug that is anything but glamorous. The Cocaine Chronicles is assembled in four sections that loosely dictate the varying degrees of addiction and the affects that cocaine has on its participants.

An encounter between two men in a dive bar incurs chilling consequences in Lee Child's sharp opener, "The Keys" , as the reader bears witness to a low-rate drug mule's frantic confession that he robbed from a powerful Colombian crew - a million to be exact, in cash and keys - to what he believes to be a stranger. In Laura Lippman's "The Crack Cocaine Diet", two seemingly vapid mall rats resolve that the only way to be superior to the boyfriends who have dumped them is to drop weight fast and since the doctors are too "tight with the scripts" and fad diets just won't do, they decide on a cocaine binge to loose their excess baggage. After a series of phone calls, they make off for their adventure and a comedy of errors ensues from confusing drug slang ("American Idol" & "Survivor" as code names for coke and heroin) to screaming at dealers for refunds, the story takes a darker turn when the girls end up at a dealer's home. Lippman soars by deploying subtle cues of the underlying resentment between the two "best friends" and by the story's elegantly-drawn close, the reader learns to never underestimate vengeful, suburban girls.

In the section "Fiending", we shift from cocaine dabbling to full-blown addictions, where weekend party favors morph into daily rituals that turn into the shakes, the twitches, and suddenly you're hungry for your next fix. A junkie narrator crashes with his sixty-three-year-old "weirdly hot" drug dealer, Suzy, as she repeatedly regales Hollywood stories about her dead B-celebrity husband, while begging for coke to be shot up her ass in Jerry Stahl's pitch-perfect, "Twilight of the Stooges" . Stahl captures the tragic and hysterical life of an addict with pristine lucidity:

I don't have memories. I just have nerves that still hurt in my brain. Shooting coke does that. Even when you're smoking it, when you fixed you could just wipe the inside of your skull clean as porcelain. Coke was about toilets and toilets were shiny white.

Through dialogue repetition, false light and a glaring television screen that dully illuminates, Stahl navigates the addict's world with such vigor. Where cocaine is the only light even when you realize you can't remotely feel anything - all your emotions have numbed, where self-humiliation is par for the course and you've become this person who thinks coke is salvation but you're left with white-outs and a life not lived, suffering in a confined, inescapable state of despair that worsens with the passing of each day. In Robert Ward's deliciously twisted "Chemistry", a self-professed "connoisseur" of women - seducing unsuspecting women with feigned sensitivity and cocaine at his local bar - discovers the cost of his sly, manipulative mind-games.

In the section "Corruption", the lens turns its focus outward, to ruminate on the victims of cocaine who are not solely the users. Neglected children that assume adult roles while toiling in their own filth, still yearn to be innocent, playful children yet suffer the consequences of the adult users in their life (a dope-fiend mother, a paternal "pleasant" drug dealer and a down & out landlord frightened to lose his drug connection) in Kerry West's deft tale, "Shame".

In the final section, "Gangsters and Monsters", characters are at their southernmost point. A kingpin drug lord who has now found god and the good life but struggles to snitch on a murder that could inevitably cost him his life, a man leading a ho-hum life is finally awakened when his car is stolen and used in a fatal police car chase/drug bust and a ex-con chef trying to lead a sober, mindful life, gets pulled into the world of celebrity when he works for an eccentric music mogul - all the stories offer the hope for redemption, a way out.

With the exception of a few overwritten, unrealized accounts - the all too-familiar theme that cocaine will ruin your life, with little deviation from this ideology of JUST SAY NO! - the stories in The Cocaine Chronicles are sometimes poignant, sometimes horrifying, but quite frequently, rather satisfying.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Cocaine Chronicles, March 10, 2007

By 

Emmett Anglin "Band Director" (South Carolina) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Cocaine Chronicles (Paperback)

Series of short stories all centering around cocaine use. Started reading it last night. Hard to put down. Gives those of us who have no clue as to how the world of cocaine works some insight. Very interesting - fiction or not.

4.0 out of 5 stars Collection of short stories related to cocaine, September 21, 2007

By 

Michael L. Slavin "HardBopper" (New Jersey) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Cocaine Chronicles (Paperback)

This collection of 17 stories though uneven at times, as might expected, is all in all a worthwhile read. I particularly enjoyed Ten Keys by Lee Child about a guy trying to rip off drug dealers; Susan Straight's Poinciana about a strung out hooker;Chemistry by Robert Ward about the set up in a bar of a self styled stud; Golden Pacific by Nina Revoyr about the sad life of a 13 year old girl forced into prostitution;Sentimental Value by Manuel Ramos about a former star athlete who was seriously injured in Vietnam; Just Surviving Another day by Detrice Jones about the day to day struggle for survival of a black schoolgirl;and Bill Moody's Camaro Blue about a jazz musician who ends up touched romantically by the death of a car thief.