Publisher's Synopsis
The ghetto is a metaphor for the dreams spinning out of the unconscious while its children puzzle over their destiny. Naughty by nature, creatures of habit evolving from the gutter with a loose morality and an attitude of defiance - panic infected everything they did. With an adolescent charm and a cunning charisma, Dion Johnson found the problem of making a living not a very difficult one to solve - he had a liar's imagination. It was survival - to find a friend was to find a collaborator for the larceny in his heart. It was scheme - his idea of romance goes no deeper than his ability to separate a woman from her panties or a man from his wallet. It was game - drugs, sex and murder.
Every struggle to control himself led to a desperation that ordained failure. Conquering the streets meant harnessing the rage. He would fuel this rage for as long as he could with malicious fantasy, as if he could convince himself that he would stay buoyed above the abyss indefinitely. Violence had destroyed his earlier life and pursued his present until he was drowning in a butchered dream, sinking deeper into the sewage of the city. He'd watch children on the street for clues on how to behave, the best he could do was remind himself over and over again that he was still a kid. But he couldn't remember what being a kid felt like. His was the tears of every child ever betrayed by an adult compromise. There was a hardness that ran through him, a hardness of wild animal terror. The rage sank in and kept cutting deeper and deeper into his psyche, and in the months and years it had submerged and laid low, but it had also convoluted with each new change in his circumstances, until finally, worst of all, it had grown. A rich tapestry vividly alive with tragedy, comedy, bitterness and hope. The story unfolds in a rags to riches saga depicting the psycho-social trials of an impoverished kid navigating the emotional minefields of his own panic while suffering delusions wrought by the mean streets of Detroit. Abandoned by his parents and separated from his siblings, Dion is forced to find a reality in a world of illusions fostered by those who profess to love him. The journey toward manhood is haunted by psychological crippling accommodations borne of desperation and spiritual deficiencies. Concrete Jungle is a novel that reveals an odyssey of anguish embittered by a desperate search for sanity in a dark dimension of slow death and a game that does not forgive error.
