Although it features plot beats and scenarios that are well familiar to readers of gang fiction, STRONG FAMILY MEMBERS offers a refreshingly candid take on the genre. Jiggy is a former pimp and ex-con who has risen to a position of status on the streets of Toronto. In contradistinction to, say, Tony Montana, whose glitzy world so conspicuously brings him little joy, Jiggy remains besotted with the trappings of the high life, swapping smiles with pop stars and DJs, wearing the most expensive jewelry and fashions, and dining on oysters. Like Montana, however, Jiggy is a thoroughly unpleasant character.
This is particularly the case where women are involved. The misogyny, casual violence towards women, and use-them-then-lose-them attitudes on display are not so much apologized for as simply asserted, without judgment or subtext. As a result of that (and several other unpleasant traits besides), one never roots for Jiggy. But all the same, one gets a sense of the faintest of echoes of a good man – of the person he might have become if, say, his elder brother’s work ethic had rubbed off on him and he had stayed away from, as author GHAD puts it, “the older homies” who formed the gang known as Solid Linx. GHAD gives no shrift to the tired old cliches of criminals with puritanical leanings in the traditional sense of being beholden to their own consciences. However, it is nonetheless depicted clearly enough that Jiggy possesses some sort of moral compass based around loyalty and fairness to those under him, even if his due north points very differently to that of other people.
GHAD has great facility with naturalistic dialog and setting, and the plot, if familiar, is well structured and cleverly executed. Jiggy is targeted by Ratta, a gang member turned police informer, but when Ratta bungles the hit and assaults an innocent woman and her child in Jiggy’s neighborhood instead, Jiggy seeks to take Ratta out in revenge. Before Jiggy can get to the business, however, Ratta shoots up the SUV of members of Jiggy’s gang instead – and things spiral downwards from there. Readers of crime fiction will find much to like in the close attention paid to the minutiae of life in a gang: the drug deals, the plans for hits that are oddly satisfying in their exactitude and comprehensiveness, and the hopes for better things to come.
One aspect of the novel fails to please, and that is its depictions of the sexual act. The sexual politics may well be true to life for a character of Jiggy’s stripe, and there is much of interest in the way in which GHAD recounts his protagonist’s matter-of-fact attitude towards making conquests, but the sex scenes themselves – and there are several – are boringly (and literally) pornographic. With such lurid descriptions only a few clicks away in today’s day and age, there is little to be gained by including them in a novel that is otherwise by turns fascinating, repellent, and ultimately harrowing.
GHAD ‘s STRONG FAMILY MEMBERS is by turns hard to stomach, ugly, and objectionable; but it is also gripping and suspenseful – and, as with any good novel about criminality, it manages to make readers profoundly uncomfortable at the spectacle they are witnessing, yet unable to turn away.
~Craig Jones for IndieReader