Take a whiff on me

Ingrate that I am, I requested a review copy of Akashic Books' Cocaine Chronicles and subsequently forgot to mention it here. It's a collection of short stories with the same theme: cocaine and its multifarious forms.

It's a diverse group of writers, from Lee Child to Jerry Stahl to Laura Lippman. Stahl's contribution, Twilight of the Stooges, is by far my favorite. Nina Revoyr's Golden Pacific and Susan Straight's Poinciana are both poignant, hideous portraits of the inevitable sex work driven by the need for crack. And the fantastic Chemistry, by Robert Ward, is like a cross between Gaddis and the Twilight Zone.

Anthologies never fail to have a couple head-scratching duds, and I was particularly disappointed by Lippman's story, The Crack Cocaine Diet, and James Brown's The Screenwriter. Still, Chronicles was a fun, fast (heh) read. It's a bit of a time capsule of the late 80s and early 90s, which were truly the golden years of crack. In a few more years, I'll expect a lot of really, really long crystal meth anthologies.