Authors like Donald Goines

If, like me, you’re a fan of Donald Goines novels such as Dopefiend, Black Girl Lost, Whoreson, the whole Kenyatta series, Swamp Man and others, you may be wondering, who are some authors like Donald Goines.

The obvious first choice has got to be Iceberg Slim, who was a major influence on Donald Goines and wrote a similar style of urban fiction.

A less obvious choice would be Victor Hugo, who wrote Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but if you actually read either of these books, you notice they have massive casts of down and out characters struggling in an economic and socially oppressive atmosphere. I never expected to draw this kind of comparison, but I read The Hunchback of Notre Dame last year and felt like it had the same easy readability as all my favorite Goines novels and even the aspects I don’t love about Donald Goines novels (a bit moralistic at times - especially thinking of the ending to Dopefiend where he’s like “Porky never did drugs”) are present in Hugo’s work.

Another obvious choice for authors like Donald Goines is big boss Calvin Westra, author of the novel Donald Goines, an adaptation of Dopefiend that involves bird-named puppeteers, drugs called drugs, an out of business video store called Videos, a drug dealer (obvious ripoff of Porky) called the pig, and a ton of other stuff. Donald Goines functions as a brand within the book that offers knock offs like can openers that don’t always work as they should, but also sells a soft drink with such good carbonation it’s the obvious choice over Pepsi or Coke.

You should one hundred percent buy my book Donald Goines if you are looking for books like the ones that Donald Goines actually wrote.

The hardest part about recommending books to people who want authors like Goines is that there aren’t a whole lot of authors exactly like Goines. Hell, there are maybe zero authors quite like him and so it’s important to try to understand what specifically a person was getting from Goines.

What I got from Goines is a crazy thing. He taught me how worldbuilding should really be done and I genuinely think he did it by accident. He was just a cool guy and he assumed you were a cool guy as well and was willing to go just slow enough that if by crazy chance you aren’t a cool guy you can manage to keep up anyway.

And as of right now I’m going to call this the Cool Guy Rule of Worldbuilding.

I’m figuring this out as I type (which is common for me) and I am realizing that the Cool Guy Rule of Worldbuilding is actually such a cool way of covering this concept. The idea is that any normal cool ass person is not interested in cringe pilot episode type dialogue where the characters very transparently and clumsily try to tell you about themselves by speaking loudly and explicitly to one another about who they are and their relation to everyone else.

It can really throw you off and you have to suspend your disbelief when it is happening the same way you might if a dinosaur suddenly crashed through a wall in the story.

But actually it’s worse because if you just witnessed a dinosaur crashing through a wall you could still rely on the characters staying in character and handling it however they’d handle something that intense and weird.

But with the pilot dialogue, ‘hey let’s get you up to speed on everything’ style of worldbuilding that most books and movies and TV shows and stuff try to do, you have to experience characters act out of character.

And you have to experience this at the very start of your journey with these characters.

And so everything is fucked up and you have no idea what to believe or expect.

It sucks.