Doom Fox

A former pimp, ex-con and all around hustler, the late Iceberg Slim (ne Robert Beck) wrote a series of underground bestsellers presenting a harrowing vision of African American ghetto life, rife with crime and personal betrayal. Despite their often caricatured dialect and hyperbolically rendered sex and violence, many of his novels are redeemed by a core of social truth. This book, however, a ghetto farce written in 1978 and never published, contain very few truths of any kind. It is the story of a decent but simple-minded heavyweight contender, Joe Allen; his operatically dysfunctional family; and his sappy love for the beautiful and rather temptable Reba, his childhood ""play sister."" Among a large cast of ghetto stereotypes Slim presents Reba's conniving parents, the busted card shark Baptiste and his nymphomaniac wife, Phillipa, in a series of bombastic personal tragedies brought on by their own cartoonish character flaws. Joe hounds his philandering father into destitution and madness; marries Reba, who wantonly cheats on him; and finally lands in prison after murdering her lover. The writing is howlingly bad (""...the derby-hatted knight of his man-prince rears a blue-black awesome shadow...""); only Slim's fans will likely get a kick out of his excesses. The book's dubious introduction (""the life he describes is real"") is by gangsta rapper Ice-T, who could easily be a character in an Iceberg Slim novel. (Oct.)