The Kings of Cool was published by Simon & Schuster in 2012 as a prequel to Savages. The novel moves between two timelines: the present, where Ben, Chon, and O’s marijuana operation is thriving, and the 1960s-80s, where their parents — a generation of Laguna Beach surfers, hippies, and aspiring revolutionaries — created the drug culture that their children inherited.
Winslow traces the devolution of the Laguna Beach counterculture with the precision of a social historian: the idealistic surfers of the 1960s who smoked marijuana as a sacrament; the dealers of the 1970s who turned the sacrament into a business; the cocaine cowboys of the 1980s who turned the business into an empire; and the inevitable involvement of organized crime that followed the money. Ben and Chon, in the present, are the inheritors of this history — sophisticated, technologically adept, and morally ambiguous in ways that their flower-child parents would not have recognized.
The dual-timeline structure allows Winslow to draw parallels between generations: the same beaches, the same drugs, the same tensions between freedom and consequence, repeated with variations across four decades. The style is the same fragmented, high-velocity prose as Savages, and the two books together constitute Winslow’s most complete portrait of Southern California’s relationship with the drug trade.
Collecting The Kings of Cool
First edition (Simon & Schuster, New York, 2012): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $10–$25
- Very good/very good: $5–$12