What People Do for Money, by
Kandi Kane.
Warning: although the book begins idyllically—“It was early Saturday
morning I was awakened by the birds loud chirping.”—all hell breaks loose quickly,
and it becomes a brutal, nasty morality
tale—evil vs. really evil—set on the
streets of Detroit in a culture of killers, perverts, addicts, dealers, thugs, thieves,
pimps and hos, with graphic descriptions of degeneracy, rape, torture, murder, you
name it.
But that’s a different post. Like the blurb says, “When money and
power take over the hood ain't nobody safe.” This
post is about language.
Authentic, expressive writing, can be stylized
or it can be like “The word on the street travel fast, Smoke and Slick was already on the
scene.” Whatever way, good writing gets in your head. Even with all the butchery and bloodshed and the
lewd and lascivious behavior going on in What
People Do For Money, you can’t help enjoy, on a different level, the
accuracy of the author’s descriptions: for
example, when the scene is “the Fat nigga Babymama house” you can clearly hear
the risible scorn, as well as vividly see it in your mind’s eye.
Kandi Kane provides many examples of vibrant writing
to choose from; for instance, replacing “there” with “it”:
·
“When
they entered the house it was two guys in the living room playing video games.”
·
“The
house was full of shit on the floor but it wasn't no dog around.”
·
“It was
so many drug dealers present they took…”
·
“It was
a bunch of guns in the room he grabbed them too. “
·
“It was
a 45 and some Kush in the car.”
And I’m a sucker for the use of “had went”: “A few days had went by so we…”
And, finally, the
sampling and mixing: “Light bulbs
and dollar signs start going off in their heads.” Or, “Money was the root
to all this evil that we had been experiencing. We had crossed a road where we
couldn't turn back…”
The plot also gets tangled up in itself and all
the killing and mayhem—a few more paragraph breaks would help—but man, this is what the 99c genre for literary entertainment
should be—this is the gold standard by
which all 99c entertainment literature should be measured—when it comes to the
precious use of language.
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