Sleeping With the Enemy

June 9, 2008
Two novellas from Clark and Swinson prove to be inaccessible to anyone not already familiar with street lit and will likely disappoint fans of the genre. In Clark’s “Enemy in My Bed,” Memphis weed dealer Kreesha is in love with Reign, even though he’s locked up and married to someone else. When he gets out of prison, she sets him up with a dealing business. When he gets busted, he turns on Kreesha and her crew, but Kreesha doesn’t plan on going down easy. Swinson’s “Keeping My Enemies Close” follows Larissa Taylor, who smuggles drugs into prison for her boyfriend, Sean “Supreme” Miller. She gets caught, and a pregnant Larissa eventually gives custody of her son to her friend Tenisha. Turns out, though, that Tenisha set her up, and now Tenisha has Larissa’s son and man. When Larissa gets out of prison, there’s a bloody payback. Unfortunately, the dialect is heavy, the language coarse and the characters little more than vehicles for playing out revenge fantasies.