Customer Reviews

Ganja Tales

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Lay it on me brother! Thanks to Craig Pugh for writing a book that doesn't extol the merits of marijuana or take a holier-than-thou attitude toward it. Ganja Tales looks at the dope-smoking community straight on, using today's language. We get people we all know, in situations we've all been in, laid out in all honesty. A collection of short stories, Pugh's lucid prose moves the plots along while capturing the details that immerse you in the situation.

"Slingin'" touches on a dealer who finds himself at the wrong end of a gun. It's suspenseful and I felt tense all the way through. In "Sisters" we get a female perspective, as women and their babies live with pot-smoking/dealing dads. One guy goes nuts trying to find some weed in "Reefer Madness," tearing his apartment apart. Even the supporting characters, kidnappers, clients, roommates, are fleshed out in revealing detail.

My favorite story is "Torched." It explores the craft of glass blowing, and we see Pugh's technical knowledge. He describes how the glass is positioned, worked with, and the need to keep the piece moving. "It's in the flame, and it's glowing like an aura or a rainbow, and the colors are shifting and changing, shimmering and twirling." The reader not only sees the process, but also feels the movement through the sentence structure. All this technical information is slipped in while we enjoy a story about a guy blinded to the outside world by his flame. Such layers of meaning exist in all of Pugh's stories.

Ganja Tales is an entertaining escape that offers much more on closer inspection. I was pleasantly surprised, and highly recommend this book for any reader. It's not solely a marijuana book - it's about universal human experiences. In any story, you can replace marijuana with your drug of choice: cigarettes, money, power. The writing holds. Artistic sketches punctuate these sketches of life, too. Ganja Tales will please your simplest desires and satisfy your more discriminating tastes.

As a card carrying member of the gin-and -whiskey generation, I got quite a jolt from reading this collection of nine stories all dealing with drug users whose every act is motivated by the prospect of their next high or by reminiscences about outstanding highs in their pasts.

In fact there were several jolts, some pleasant, some not. Craig Pugh is an honest writer who unmasks much of what is false and petentious in modern societies by placing his characters in situations, sometimes dangerous ones, that require interaction with the establishment or with the law. Most of the characters, depressingly inarticulate narcissists, are young and apparently permanent members of the underclass, even if their origins may have been otherwise. Some have the beginnings of an education. Others have none. Their conversation is as stuimulating as a brick wall and as hard to penetrate, owing to the extensive sub-culture lexicon they use. Apart from their highs, one has to ask what their values might be like.

These stories are not of uniform quality but several are good. In "Slingin'" the drug dealing Tony is kidnapped by two murderous urban savages who stab him and then force him to drive out of town so they can finish him off, and the reader does not expect him to survive the ordeal. The narrator makes the most of Tony's thoughts, similar to what the rest of us would think in such life-threatening circumstances.

The final story, about a wood carver who has a semi-mystical experience at the rim of a volcano-crater that manages to work out some inner demons that had been bothering him, is probably the best in the whole collection.

The author get high marks for his lean-and-mean prose style and also for writing mostly out of the thoghts of his characters, out of their mental processes and personality quirks. He even makes some of them likable: I never thought I could feel empathy for a drug dealer like Tony.

This book is Ok. Pugh could use a lesson or two on writing technique. The book is an easy read. I found that reading this book was a nice pre-smoking activity. I got this book new on Amazon, and I was pleasantly surprised to find my copy signed by Pugh.

Lay it on me brother! Thanks to Craig Pugh for writing a book that doesn't extol the merits of marijuana or take a holier-than-thou attitude toward it. Ganja Tales looks at the dope-smoking community straight on, using today's language. We get people we all know, in situations we've all been in, laid out in all honesty. A collection of short stories, Pugh's lucid prose moves the plots along while capturing the details that immerse you in the situation.

"Slingin'" touches on a dealer who finds himself at the wrong end of a gun. It's suspenseful and I felt tense all the way through. In "Sisters" we get a female perspective, as women and their babies live with pot-smoking/dealing dads. One guy goes nuts trying to find some weed in "Reefer Madness," tearing his apartment apart. Even the supporting characters, kidnappers, clients, roommates, are fleshed out in revealing detail.

My favorite story is "Torched." It explores the craft of glass blowing, and we see Pugh's technical knowledge. He describes how the glass is positioned, worked with, and the need to keep the piece moving. "It's in the flame, and it's glowing like an aura or a rainbow, and the colors are shifting and changing, shimmering and twirling." The reader not only sees the process, but also feels the movement through the sentence structure. All this technical information is slipped in while we enjoy a story about a guy blinded to the outside world by his flame. Such layers of meaning exist in all of Pugh's stories.

Ganja Tales is an entertaining escape that offers much more on closer inspection. I was pleasantly surprised, and highly recommend this book for any reader. It's not solely a marijuana book - it's about universal human experiences. In any story, you can replace marijuana with your drug of choice: cigarettes, money, power. The writing holds. Artistic sketches punctuate these sketches of life, too. Ganja Tales will please your simplest desires and satisfy your more discriminating tastes.