Acid Alex comes with a warning: Enter at own risk. Because: "Multilingual Obscenity, Widescale Offensiveness, Murky Scandals, Straightforward Defamation, Pantheonic Blasphemy, as well as Racial, Linguistic, Religious, Sexual and several badly defined Prejudices aimed at both Individuals and Institutions are discussed volubly within."

And definitely don't try any of this at home, kids.

Acid Alex is the life story of South African drug smuggler Al Lovejoy - and it's one worth telling. It starts with a childhood of horrific abuse at the hands of his adoptive parents and various educational institutions and reformatories, which sets the stage for the adulthood of drug infused, chaotic violence and organised crime that follows, including three years spent in a Belgian jail.

It might be true, as he says in the book's first paragraph, that he was born to tell this story - but it's somewhat of a miracle he lived to tell it at all.

I'm sure glad he did. This is, as Koos Kombuis says in the forward, "a book which is about to turn South African literature on its head".

It sheds light on a "lost generation" of South Africans, who grew up during the 70s, 80s and 90s, let down by the system and left to make sense of it all in the country's clubs, shebeens and gangs.

Lovejoy says he had to cut roughly the size of a novel from the final version and somewhere in the middle of the book he invites you, if you ever run into him, to buy him a beer and he'll tell you the rest of it.

I'm definitely taking him up on the offer next time I go home to the Bos - this is the oke who controlled the drug trade in Upstairs and Mash when my school buddies and I were still giggling over our first sips of cider there. He's like the anti-hero of my generation. And reading Acid Alex is like sitting opposite the guy in Die Akker, goofed with a bottle of Tassies between you, listening to the type of shocking, hilariously crazy (exaggerated? it's hard to tell) drunken escapades and close shaves many a guy would like to brag about but few are actually tough enough to ever have experienced.

It's written in a loud, foul-mouthed South African slang that makes for colourful reading. To help you follow the story and distinguish between tampons and tiffies, buttonkoppe and roekers, gattas and boere, skates and shivs, candy and charlie, bras,chinas and bizas, there is a six-page glossary of terms in the back, some of which have probably never appeared in print before.

He writes with a fearless honesty, like a man with nothing left to lose writing his way to redemption.

The amount of factual detail the book contains about practices and individuals within South Africa's drug trade and prisons is astonishing. How he has not been slapped with a libel suit or hunted down by some of the unsavoury characters he describes is beyond me.

He even labels one of my former pastors in Stellenbosch as a "psycho-logical hijacker" leading a "quasi-cultist" outfit and a "ou you know is lying continuously because his lips move when he speaks".

But I'm inclined to forgive him, as - despite his raving hysteria against the hypocrisy of religious organisations (much of which many a 'victim' of the NG Kerk during apartheid will agree with) - the book nexpectedly turns out to be one of the greatest spiritual testimonies I've ever read.

It also, ultimately, teaches that crime doesn't pay, drugs don't work and we should all do more to protect the innocent children.

It's a book I would recommend every South African to read - for its educational as well as entertainment value.

Apparently Lovejoy is working on a screen play for the movie version of the book. If he pulls it off, it will be a cult classic somewhere between the Trainspotting and Pulp Fiction of South Africa.

Acid Alex by Al Lovejoy, from Zebra press, 368p, now available for R111.96 from Kalahari.net.