Web of the City by Harlan Ellison

Rusty Santoro wants to get out of the Cougars, but you don't just walk away from a New York street gang. His violent exit from the gang is just the beginning of his troubles. Things get personal when someone rapes and kills his sister, Dolores. Rusty, blind with rage and vengeance, is willing to take on the whole gang - and the entire New York underworld, if necessary - to find her killer and exact street-level justice.

Web of the City was Harlan Ellison's first novel and is reprinted by Hard Case Crime. The often controversial but always entertaining writer started work on the book while he was in the army in the 1950s. Opening these pages is like opening a time capsule. The descriptions paint a tough New York of the 50s in a dark pallette, where ruthless teenagers wielding knives and zip guns and hopped up on dope lurk in every shadow. The language is stuffed with slang that may have been intimidating in its time but is quaint now. I found myself often thinking of West Side Story. Unlike West Side, the only dancing done here is with knives. Ellison's portrayal of a street gang is frighteningly lifelike; he did infiltrate a gang for research at one point in his career.

When you're finished with Web of the City, keep on reading. Hard Case was awesome enough to include a couple short stories by Ellison published earlier in those delightful detective magazines of the 50s and 60s. And while I usually skip over any author introductions, the one that accompanies this book is a brief and enlightening account of the start of one the greatest sci-fi writers of the past century.