Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)This volume should have been called The Book of Roaches. Black combines his love of writing with his love of pot in this strange amalgam of stories, poems, and autobiography. The opening section about living among cockroaches is more disgusting than funny, and has less to do with living "high" than with living poor, but at least it possesses something resembling short story structure. Unfortunately, this is pretty much the high point of Black's disjointed, unfocused ramblings. There's no overarching plotline for most of the work. Characters come and go without leaving any more impression than the mottoes on their t-shirts. The book culminates in Black's "efforts" to obtain his master's degree in fine arts, but the outcome is anything but inspiring. The rest of the material is stupefyingly banal because the protagonist so rarely actually gets off his duff and does anything. Could Mr. Black have used a few more lessons in story construction? Or does he just need to get a life?
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This book is stoned.
This book is high.
This book is the product of an illegal mind, the spawn of an outlawed consciousness.
Separately these stories, essays, poems, and jokes don't mean much. So I cleaned them up, dumped them out onto paper, and then rolled up a big joint of words.
And this is the result. It smolders with imaginative horror, mystical speculation, hyper-vivid dreams, disconnected humor, and nebulous memories. There are words all over the place, stray lines and ideas leading no where, weird scenes flaming up and then dying down, characters drifting in, and then stumbling out amidst swirling poems and rambling psychedelic thought-talk.
That's why I call it The Book of Smoke.
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