What genre is Donald Goines

Donald Goines wrote crime novels and drug novels but more than just that he wrote adventure novels and people novels. He wrote books about people going through difficult shit and trying their best to navigate it. One of my favorite examples of Donald Goines’s scope as a writer is Swamp Man which isn’t really about drugs or crime, except for the crime committed by the bad guys. In Swamp Man a guy’s sister is raped and mentally damaged through forced drugging and the whole book is about taking revenge. It’s a great and tragic and deeply disturbing story full of violence but it’s also really different from books like Whoreson or Dopefiend or Kenyatta’s Revenge. It would very hard to argue that Swamp Man was urban fiction, for instance.

When I was writing my book, Donald Goines, I remember thinking about Swamp Man and wanting to invoke at least some of the elements of it. The planned adventurousness, the belief in righting a wrong. More than most Donald Goines novels, Swamp Man is about getting justice when justice is very clear and obvious. Revenge against the people who wronged you or your family must be one of the simplest and most clear cut forms of justice and it makes Swamp Man a startlingly straightforward story, especially compared with the large casts of books like Dopefiend or the circuitous circumstances of a book like Black Girl Lost.

While Donald Goines has probably never been described as fantasy or magical realism or speculative fiction or science fiction, I think there’s an argument to be made that there are elements of these genres in Donald Goines as well. Definitely, when I was writing my book and building out the world I thought about how I learned all sorts of crazy elements in Goines stories in sort of abstract or unspoken ways. Characters just do things. They work jobs, they go places, they gamble, they get high, they talk, they have hairstyles, and more often than not the specifics of these were not particularly clear to me because I was never alive in 1970s Detroit. So the way they got high, or gambled, or even the names of hairstyles were just kind of lost on me and yet I enjoyed the books anyway. To me, a lot of science fiction/fantasy novels get bogged down trying to explain the world to you, when real worldbuilding is more about letting the characters exist totally naturally in a world that makes sense to them.

In this way, Donald Goines actually really paved the way for a Goinesian speculative genre, perhaps we could call it Goinesian magical realism, that few have capitalized on.

The best genre Donald Goines fits naturally into is crime novels in the sense that all of his books delve deeply into the criminal underworld, murder, drug dealing, prostitution, gambling, conning, and other stuff that Goines clearly understood really well. In a similar manner to William S. Burrough’s Junky where Burroughs explains how to hustle doctors out of prescriptions and stuff like that, Goines kind of explains a particular hustle before showcasing characters engaging in it and I think that kind of thing is very cool.

This also distinguishes a Goines novel from some basic crime thriller type novel. Goines didn’t really write thrillers full of tension, yet his books are hard to put down. I tried to imitate that style of go nowhere antics with characters just hanging out and doing crime and buying drugs and goofing off in my own magical realism Donald Goines rare birds puppets and some other shit type of way.