The Sly Lake Gang

The Sly Lake Gang is the story of four estranged friends brought together through circumstance to face down a merciless killer -a monster connected to a strange incident from their childhood. Apathetic insurance professional Donald Borland reaches out for his adoptive brother Darren Lemay after a horrific accident. Darren, ever the leader, marshals the forces of their childhood friends Monica King and Dr. Patrick Williams. After a miraculous recovery, Donald and his friends return to their childhood stomping grounds: Clarkson, a sleepy retirement community nestled in Northern Ontario that harbors a powerful and unnatural force. Meanwhile Patrick’s old friend Jason Brower, a small town hero and police constable, is trying to save Clarkson from a bizarre and seemingly inhuman murderer. He reaches out to his friend and learns the dark secret that Patrick and his cohorts have kept quiet for nearly twenty years, kept by the pseudo superheroes who call themselves The Sly Lake Gang.

Refusing to cast gangs in solely criminal terms, Robert J. Durán, a former gang member turned scholar, recasts such groups as an adaptation to the racial oppression of colonization in the American Southwest. Developing a paradigm rooted in ethnographic research and almost two decades of direct experience with gangs, Durán completes the first-ever study to follow so many marginalized groups so intensely for so long, revealing their core characteristics, behavior, and activities within two unlikely American cities. Durán spent five years in Denver, Colorado, and Ogden, Utah, conducting 145 interviews with gang members, law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and other relevant individuals. From his research, he constructs a comparative outline of the emergence and criminalization of Latino youth groups, the ideals and worlds they create, and the reasons for their persistence. He also underscores the failures of violent gang suppression tactics, which have only further entrenched these groups within the barrio. Encouraging cultural activists and current and former gang members to pursue grassroots empowerment, Durán proposes new solutions to racial oppression that challenge and truly alter the conditions of gang life.

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The primary source writings in this anthology have been selected to provide your readers with a broad spectrum of viewpoints on gangs and gang violence. Readers will evaluate the causes of gang formation and gang violence, and whether the number of gangs and gang violence is increasing in the United States. An important question about the topic is presented in each chapter, and viewpoints are organized based on their response. Fact boxes summarize important information for researchers, and an extensive bibliography is included.