As the heartbroken Doris is reminded by a succession of commentators, from the many well-meaning LAPD officers to the spirit messengers who appear to her in a vision, Neon’s infamies are the inevitable result of her failure to take a timely belt to his hide. (The origin of the Bloods’ nemeses, the Crips, is traced to one Willie Wright, a legendary bum-legged prison bodybuilder whose simmering beef with Neon sparks the historic red-vs.-blue antagonism.) Neon is a stone-cold thief and killer with no redeeming qualities except a lingering sentimentality toward his mom, and his story is an old-fashioned parable. Along the way, Neon and his less epic brother Rap start the Bloods street gang during a stint in juvie, using candy shipments from Earl and Doris–there is no limit to their indulgence–as a patronage fund. Everything flows from that misguided lenience–arson, robbery, rape and murder, all of it crescendoing to a Sophoclean family tragedy. But by far the most important factor is that–from the time little Neon throws a tantrum and receives a hot dog instead of a spanking–his parents refuse to mete out the whippings his misbehavior so richly deserves. His mother Doris walks out on her cheating husband Earl, transplants her brood from a small Texas town to Los Angeles’s crime-ridden Compton ghetto and raises them without an appropriate male role model in the home. There are familiar social influences at play in Rodney â€œNeon” Robinson’s development into a fearsome crime lord during the 1960s.

Parents spare the rod and turn their child into the mythic founder of the Bloods in this lurid gangster saga.

Novel first blood