By T.W. COAKLEY, RONALD K. SIEGEL (RKS Library Editions/Process Media; 2017)
This is the second entry in the RKS Library Editions series of “lost and forgotten masterpieces of drug literature.” It follows RKS’ 2013 republication of HASHISH by Fritz Lemmermayer, which took that long neglected 1898 “classic” and decked it out with illustrations and supplemental material. KEEF, a novel by T.W. Coakley that was originally published in 1897, gets a similar treatment, with a wealth of info on Coakley’s life and works, reproductions of artwork pertaining to the novel, and also an extensive primer on the uses and effects of kif, the highly refined form of hashish that that provides KEEF’S title and motivating agent. The entire book, in fact, can be said to function as an eccentric guidebook to kif and its history.
As for the novel itself, alas, there’s a reason it’s been forgotten. Hailed back in the day as “one of 1897’s most important publishing events” (alongside the more deserving likes of THE INVISIBLE MAN and CAPTAIN’S COURAGEOUS), KEEF was admittedly heavily inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Oval Portrait,” whose original 1842 magazine publication, bearing the title “Life In Death,” is among the supplemental material included here.
The story concerns Leon Abecassis, a painter raised in Tangiers, Morocco, where as a child he first learned of the joys and horrors of kif–or, as spelled here, keef. As an adult he becomes determined to find a way by which “the transient exaltation of spirit which I have so often experienced could be sustained,” and settles on smoking keef. It’s not long before Abecassis becomes a full-blown addict, with the hallucinations engendered by the keef taking on the form of a beautiful woman. Eventually, to his shock, Abecassis sees that woman in the flesh, in the form of a colleague’s sickly wife.
What follows involves death, betrayal and murder, all brought about by the protagonist’s irrepressible keef smoking. T.W. Coakley, whose only novel this was, is to be commended for the subtlety with which he develops his story. That Abecassis has gone mad from his excessive keef usage and lost the ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy isn’t something of which we’re concretely informed anywhere in the text (I’ll confess I was expecting the info to be conveyed in a “twist” ending, but none is offered), although Coakley does provide a number of clues to Abecassis’ true condition that are pointed out by the book’s editor Ronald K. Siegel through footnotes.
Beyond that KEEF just isn’t very exciting, being overwrought and melodramatic in a way that fully shows its age. As a historic document—it being the first American novel to deal with kif smoking—it has value, and certainly RKS Library’s design and layout (as with the aforementioned HASHISH) are salutary, but it’s not a book that’s worth going out of one’s way to procure.