DOPEFIEND by Donald Goines

Finished Fr 2/14/15

Set in the early 1970's in Detroit's ghetto

Centers on Porky's dope-den (shooting gallery) and his sexually perverse and uncaring ways. He doesn't use heroin and sees his clients as less than human.

He tries to hook women so that he can make them perform sexually with his two large dogs.

The deteriorating love affair between Teddy and Terry is the major subplot of the novel. Teddy has already become less than human due to his addiction, and the novel diagrams Terry's journey into heroin Hell. She begins with a job in a department store, and lives at home with her loving parents, but she loses it all, and becomes a prostitute to pay Porky for her fixes.

She is driven insane by the sight of her friend, Minnie, who is an addict and very pregnant who commits suicide. She hangs herself in their apartment and the baby is partially born while Minnie swings at the end of a rope.

The novel ends with The Wilson's visiting Terry in a mental health facility where she has regressed to her ten year old self to retreat from the psychological horror of Minnie's death.

Teddy is shot and killed by Porky's goons after Teddy and two of his friends ripped off Porky for one thousand dollars. This money was to be paid to pay off the cops on his beat so that he could continue his illegal business. (Payoff)

The writing is pretty superficial and although the plot is horrifying, you really don't feel the desperation of the characters. It comes off as almost a over-the-top melodramatic treatise on the horrors of drug addiction.