Lance Charnes's Reviews > The Kings of Cool

Show of hands: how many of you thought we really, really needed a prequel to Savages ? Yeah, me neither. Don Winslow obviously did, and here it is, carrying with it both the good and the bad from the original along with its own virtues and vices.

This is actually two stories mashed together. One is a slice of Ben's, Chon's and O's earlier careers, before they were the kings of the Laguna Beach artisanal pot world. The other is an origins story -- not for our trio of future savages (except in a very abstract way) but instead the saga of the organized drug trade's birth on the SoCal coast. These interwoven stories could, with some fleshing out, stand on their own, which could ultimately have been a better choice for readers and author alike.

This is because the origins story is by far the more interesting, both to read and (evidently) to write. The author imbues his motley collection of 1960s/1970s Laguna Beach surfers and hippies ("The Association") with the kind of humanity that we've come to expect from later Winslow. We watch as the ramshackle supply and distribution networks -- surfers dragging bales of pot north from Mexican surf safaris, street kids hustling joints taped to the bottoms of their skateboards -- become larger, more professional, and more dangerous to interlopers. We see the mellow vibe of pot trafficking turn paranoid and mean when it switches to coke during the Reagan years, and watch the so-called War on Drugs, like Prohibition before it, encourage rather than stop crime, especially the hard-core, organized variety. Surfer/dealers swap their Woodies for Lamborghinis, and suddenly we've moved from Jan and Dean to The Eagles to Glenn Frey and Miami Vice, West Coast edition. The atmosphere is just so, the dialog right on. This is the good part -- I wish there was more of it.

The Ben/Chon/O part seems, in a way, pro forma compared to the backstory. They're not significantly different from their personas in Savages (which, by the way, I liked a bit), and their problems are much the same here as there. Their character arcs don't move much. O, in particular, remains more a fantasy than a real live girl. The backstory tells us about their wayward parents and the various random couplings that produced these three, but did we really need to know that? Does it change anything?

The things that made Savages stand out are present here, too -- the attitude, the language, the way the text breaks into blank verse or screenplay format, the two-word chapters, the sheer speed. It reads like a rocket sled; I finished it in one evening.

The Kings of Cool may have been a device to hook readers into the story the author really wanted to tell by tying it to the success of Savages. (view spoiler)[Since that book didn't leave much room for a sequel (hide spoiler)], he had to go for a prequel. Too bad. I'd have given this four stars had it been the fully developed, standalone origins of The Association; the dispensable prequel story drags it down to three.