Doom Fox

Joe "Kong" Allen and his wife, a beautiful woman who cannot be trusted, drive the story of Doom Fox. It begins just after World War II in the Los Angeles ghetto and follows events across the next thirty years.

The cast comes from the street life of the neighbourhood: low-riding men who chase women, prizefighters, prostitutes and smooth-talking preachers. The world they share is violent and vivid, and the book does not soften it.

Iceberg Slim wrote this underground novel in 1978, and it went unpublished until now. It is the last in his series of underground novels, which circulated largely by word of mouth. The no-holds-barred approach places it in the tradition of Chester Himes.

Readers get a stylish, uncensored voice drawn from the author's own record of hustler life in the inner city. Whether Kong can hold his ground beside a wife who is both gorgeous and treacherous is the question that carries the book across three decades.