Status & Sodomy

TATTOO THE WICKED CROSS by Floyd Sa/as. 351 pages. Grove. $5.95.

A novel calculated to disgust, Tattoo the Wicked Cross succeeds in its primary objective. Its subjects are prison, prestige and pederasty, more or less in that order, and will remind readers of the works of Jean Genet (The Blacks, Miracle of the Rose), celebrant of sodomy in the bastilles of modern France.

This time the setting is California, and those who retain some literary standards in today's bull market will note the marked inferiority of the local products to Genet's gothic.

Aaron d'Aragon, a 15-year-old boy gang leader, is doomed on arrival at the Golden Gate Institute of Industry & Reform, a prison farm for adolescents. There, status is based on ability to humiliate weaker kids by sexual assault. A buddy warns Aaron: "They beat 'em up first, and then gang bang 'em, man! Make queens of 'em forever." Aaron is duly raped by a giant Negro senior citizen of this very bad boys' town. No queen, though, Aaron gets revenge by putting rat poison in the clam chowder. Unfortunately, he kills his best pal as well as his persecutor. But he no longer cares; he would rather earn kingly status, even if the price is the gas chamber.

Jean Genet, as a dedicated pervert, might write lyrically of this shameful ?lace, but not so First Novelist Floyd Salas, 25, who spent time in similar institutions before winning a boxing scholarship at the University of California, later a master's degree in English at San Francisco State College. More realistically than Genet, Salas looks back in anger. Unhappily, the anger and obscenity get the better of his prose. On every page, hyperbole and hypertension batter good sense to a pulp magazine.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.