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The story is set in post-war USA. It begins with a car driving along a highway, with a pre-adolescent boy, his father, and a social worker, who is driving the car. They are heading toward a juvenile care institution because the father is unable to support the child according to the standards of American bourgeois society.
You can imagine the boy's state of mind.
The novel has a clearly autobiographical basis. Edward Bunker, in fact, spent much of his life between reform schools and prisons. At 17, he was the youngest person ever to be incarcerated in San Quentin Penitentiary, which houses California's death row.
Released at the age of 32, he headed an international organization for the trafficking of cocaine and heroin but was caught—excuse the pun—after years of search, as he was preparing a robbery (alone) at a bank in Beverly Hills.
He was sentenced to six years and sent to a penitentiary, where he found himself in a cell with nine other people. Because of this, he organized a non-violent protest, leading to his transfer and internment in the maximum-security prison in Marion, Illinois. This was a place marked by severe racial tensions due to the obviously numerous ethnicities present: Hispanics, Blacks, Asians.
On this note, I would quote one of his profoundly true statements:
"Those who have never been exposed to violence do not fear it, but collapse when confronted by it."
It was in Marion where he met the imprisoned writer Caryl Chessman and, following his example, began writing. And he did so with great success. Several of his books have been adapted into films; he collaborated on screenplays like Steve Buscemi's Animal Factory and Andrei Konchalovsky's Runaway Train, and he played the role of "Mr. Blue" in Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, not to mention selling millions of copies of his novels, Dog Eat Dog, Education of a Felon, No Beast So Fierce... None of which can be compared to the classic noir, because those books encompass everything: autobiographical memories, civil history, humor, essays, sociological criticism, philosophy, religion, ethnic awareness... There is no writer comparable in the world to Edward Bunker, absolutely.
Returning to the novel, it narrates the evolution of this boy's life, who grows up almost exclusively having to associate with a certain category of people, those rejected by society obviously: robbers, drug traffickers, unsavory individuals, and criminals of every kind. The people whom the "system" has not only punished but no longer wishes to rehabilitate. As a child, Bunker had an intelligence test administered: the result was 152. Practically a genius. And he would even experience a psychiatric hospital... Edward Bunker: his vast, exceptional, violent, painful, and conscious criminal and prison experiences served as ingredients to produce works of absolute literary and human value. He gathered water, yeast, and salt along the way, but the flour was his own.
It is also his own this final quote, with which I conclude the text.
"There is no hell. Nor is there heaven. Life is here. Pain is here. The reward is here."
A couple of interviews with Bunker, the second conducted by an Italian.
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