Want sleazy pulp filled with crazy juvenile craziness? Then this is your ticket. Dripping with sex and violence. Shocking.Crazy. Fun, Back in the olden days before the internet, folks who wanted a taste of titillating, sexy, fiction combed the drugstore racks for titles like Gang
Girl. And, at that ancient time (in the fifties), people who would one day become world-renowned authors like Robert Silverberg wrote this stuff under psuedonyms. Many authors wrote this softcore, exploitative fiction because it paid and, strangely enough, they had to pay the rent and put food on the table until some publisher with a small bit of
brains recognized their genius.

Make no bones about it. Gang Girl is a cheap thrill. It is a tawdry, exploitative piece of juvenile delinquent fiction that was popular in some circles in the fifties. It was never intended to be discussed in
ninth grade literature between Dickens and Melville.

So why read this? Well, it is a trip back into the time machine to see what was on the racks back then. But, it is also a very well written piece of tawdry dimestore pulp.

As the cover page shouts at the would-be reader, it is about "sex, drugs, and crime." It begins: "Lora Menotti was five feet five of oncentrated sex, one hundred twenty-five pounds of undiluted viciousness. She was eighteen. She was deadly. Her parents knew it and they were afraid of her."
Lora was a "deb" in the gang "The Scarlet Sinners," but when her parents move the family to a new neighborhood, she has to make a new start. She finds the local gang at the local soda shop and wants in. Lora pushes her way into the gang and, when she wants one of the guys, she pushes another girl out, way out. Lora's ambitious and she is going to be with the gang leader no matter who she has to step on in
the way.

But don't think these gangs are John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John singing ballads in "Grease." These are vicious, criminal gangs and the infighting is deadly and has consequences and the rumbles are not just fights, but with knives, antennas, and anything else they can get their hands on. Not everyone comes out of a rumble singing and dancing. Some never walk again and some wish they were dead because they are so wounded and torn apart.

Lora is like a femme fatale of detective stories, using her looks and voluptousness as a weapon to control the gang, wearing her tightest sweater when she is ready to make a move. She got her "greatest kick
of all" by manipulation. She is tough and mean and pretty much as heartless as can be, particularly to the other girls in the gang who are in her way, one time organizing a gang rape of a deb who stood in her way. The other women are dealt with viciouslessly and Lora is not too
popular among them.

The author does not glamorize gang life as other writers of juvenile delinquent literature have done. Instead, he shows the cold, hard world that these kids lived in, making the world of the Cougars gang
realistic. ( )