Kemper's Reviews > The Kings of Cool

Hey, George Lucas! Now THIS is how you do a prequel!

Don Winslow’s Savages instantly became one of my favorite crime novels, and I was a little worried about him doing another one that takes place before it. Frankly, it seemed like a rush job done to capitalize on the movie version of Savages which comes out tomorrow.

I should have had more faith in Winslow. He has expanded the backgrounds of the characters from Savages and uses their stories to give us an idea of the rise of the drug trade in southern California from the ‘60s through the turn of the century. It turns out that that drug dealers Ben and Chon (A mutated version of John.) and their shared girlfriend O (Short for Ophelia.) had a lot to contend with as they built up their pot growing empire that they were running at the beginning of Savages.

Like that book, Winslow has played with the style and format as well as taking that casual SoCal tone of voice he does so well to extreme lengths including incorporating segments that are written like a screenplay and sometimes using sentence fragments arranged on the page for maximum impact. Instead of a crime novel, this could almost be considered an epic free form poem. With shotguns.

This is that rarest of prequels, one that actually adds depth and story to the original without diluting it. There seems to be some parts of the history that don’t sync well with what we were told before, but the continuity glitches weren’t enough to seriously detract from my enjoyment.

Oh, and there’s a lot of mocking of both hippies and Republicans which made me laugh out loud repeatedly.