- Paperback: 390 pages
- Publisher: Vintage Books; Reprint edition (May 1991)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0679733957
- ISBN-13: 978-0679733959
- Product Dimensions: 20.1 x 13 x 2.5 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,545,526 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
The first novel of an author who was a survivor of the the San Francisco street drug culture and a former convict. It aims to capture the underside of big-city life and pillory the prison system as it takes the reader on a nightmarish journey between criminality and justice.
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
If you have a love of good old fashioned storytelling, a love of beautifully crafted themes, an eye for captivating descriptions, an ear for rhythm expressed in language... and you want to experience all this in a world that you're unlikely ever to visit, get this book and take a wild and colourful trip though the netherworld of San Francisco, into the underbelly of the American penal system and around the disfranchised losers and loners living on the periphery of "normal" life.
Seth Morgan's ability to weave language into beautifully intricate but accessible patterns is second to none.
Seth slammed his Harley into a bridge in New Orleans before he could finish his second novel, Mambo Mephiste. However, it appears that his editors had enough material to put the pieces together and produce a publishable book. So Mambo Mephiste will be available later this year, and you can order it from Amazon.co.uk.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
i read seth morgan's book "Homeboy" when it first came out in 1990.it is a rivetting dialogue of life where the author obviously draws on his own experiences[like ed bunker].this is the book which started me off on american crime noir.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
23 reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
I'm buying my third copy of this book
24 Oct 2002
Format:Hardcover
This is one of my all time favorite books. I am now buying my third copy to read again. My first copy I loaned to an inmate while working as a prison counselor. The guy made parole and took the book. Oh well. I found a copy again in a book store and thinking I learned my lesson, loaned it to a co-worker (now a probation officer). Again, the book did not come back. I've recommended it to so many people and have decided to try again. It's really a great description of an entirely different lifestyle. An enlightening description of "life on the edge".
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
I don't think the beast's belly can get any lower.
7 July 2004
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
I'm not normally a fiction reader but even though "Homeboy" was copywrited in 1990 I ordered and read it because I came across a recent reference to the novel that indicated it was about San Francisco. Oh yes-it was about The City and although I had lived there many years ago and could still recognize the street names and neigborhoods that was the extent of my recognition. Seth Morgan penetrates the belly of the beast to an extent that his San Francisco and later California, might just as well be on the dark side of the moon in terms of it's familiarity to what I knew of SF.
I know little about fiction writing but I can say that Morgan organized Homeboy differently than the other fiction works I've read. He has divided Homeboy into short little mini-chapters like many contemporary TV shows-stories built around a particular theme but broken into disparate separate dramas that weave in and out of each other. You must be aware because these mini-chapters dissolve and reform in new settings and at different times and because the book is so dense be prepared for a demanding ride.
This ride is bleak and uncompromising-you will be confronted by situations and activities that I, as a neophyte crime reader, had never been confronted with before. For instance, the section titled Fence Parole is as hard a piece of writing as you might find or the scene played out in Hotshot-tough stuff for a little suburban guy like me.
If you like well writen books that deal with hard subjects then Homeboy is for you-seek it out because it will be worth your time.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Wretched and Brilliant
9 Dec 2004
Format:Paperback
Seth Morgans first and last completed novel is a simultaneously brilliant and uneasy read that like an addiction, first captivates then unravels itself until the reader is rendered helpless to its grimy power.
His story begins deep in the gut of a seedy San Francisco underbelly and ends up ensconsed in the heart of a prison hell. As the story unravels, we are introduced to a smorgasbord of whacked out, grimy, and tragic characters whos' tales gather around us to weave a web of terrifyingly real and sometimes disarmingly surreal situations. The story of 'Homeboy', if it is broken down to its core, is surprisingly simple, but it is told in a way that demands the reader to concentrate. Like the first minutes in a subtitled movie, we are forced to think hard about what we are reading.
But the beauty in 'Homeboy' lies not in the story, but the unbelievable use of the English language. His descriptions of seemingly simple places, people and events are described using words that a terrestrial author would never dream of using. And yet these descriptions paint a picture of incredible detail, you can almost physically smell the stench of wretched human lives steaming out between the cracks of Coldwater Prison and feel the warm chill of heroin as it is pumped through the brittle veins of 'Rings n Things'.
The fact that we will never have the honour of another complete book by Seth Morgan is tragic. But unlike Jeff Buckley and countless other gifted artists taken from us before their time, Seth's death seems somehow apt and befits the legacy of what he has left us described within the well thumbed pages of 'Homeboy'.
His story begins deep in the gut of a seedy San Francisco underbelly and ends up ensconsed in the heart of a prison hell. As the story unravels, we are introduced to a smorgasbord of whacked out, grimy, and tragic characters whos' tales gather around us to weave a web of terrifyingly real and sometimes disarmingly surreal situations. The story of 'Homeboy', if it is broken down to its core, is surprisingly simple, but it is told in a way that demands the reader to concentrate. Like the first minutes in a subtitled movie, we are forced to think hard about what we are reading.
But the beauty in 'Homeboy' lies not in the story, but the unbelievable use of the English language. His descriptions of seemingly simple places, people and events are described using words that a terrestrial author would never dream of using. And yet these descriptions paint a picture of incredible detail, you can almost physically smell the stench of wretched human lives steaming out between the cracks of Coldwater Prison and feel the warm chill of heroin as it is pumped through the brittle veins of 'Rings n Things'.
The fact that we will never have the honour of another complete book by Seth Morgan is tragic. But unlike Jeff Buckley and countless other gifted artists taken from us before their time, Seth's death seems somehow apt and befits the legacy of what he has left us described within the well thumbed pages of 'Homeboy'.
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