The Animal Factory is the flip-side of Bunker's life; he did the crime, and this is the inevitable time. Time in San Quentin. To the prison, sent down for drugs, comes the young and uncomfortably pretty Ron. Fortunately he befriends shaven-headed wheeler-dealer Earl, and quickly learns to negotiate his way through the system as best he can. But this is San Quentin, a pressure-cooker of sexual and racial conflict, whose doctors know more about stab wounds than anyone else alive.

There's not a deal of plot to this novel, and what there is crystallises instinctively from the situation in which these men find themselves. Ron's attempt to keep his head down is crowded beyond provocation - "I've been watching you an' my dick stays hard as Chinese arithmetic...Ah'm gonna put my dick in your ass" - and drags Earl into a vicious stabbing that has unfortunate consequences for both. The meat of the book is not what happens to individuals but a portrait of men on the edge, forced explosively together by an unthinking punishment system.

Bunker is especially good, especially honest, on the details of men living without women; the ways in which five or ten years inside the walls can change a convict's way of looking at his fellow man. It has the same ring of authenticity as the race gangs that haunt the gaol - blacks, the Nazi White Brotherhood - and the casual bigotry ingrained in men who live out a violent, over-heated race war twenty-four hours a day. Earl, a self-proclaimed Marxist, is a man with no particular beef with any race, but he is also a pragmatist.

The Animal Factory is a novel about life lived in slow-motion. Everything in this place takes time, and since time is all these people have, even the smallest stuff will expand to fill the space available. This San Quentin acts as a magnifying glass for those it holds. There exists an uneasy peace between staff and inmates, unspoken give and take on both sides to keep things running, the nervous-system of the prison into which Earl and his people have tapped.

Why people are inside becomes of little importance: witness the man brought in on a driving offence whose momentary action inside has expanded his sentence to life. Only the exceptionally lucky, Bunker is saying, will escape the cycle of crime and punishment that the place breeds. Those who leave are only on the end of a length of elastic getting more taut by the hour.

Bunker is making no excuses for these people. He was lucky and through education and selling blood to get the money to send out his manuscripts he got away. No Beast So Fierce and The Animal Factory are about different characters but the same people; people that Ed Bunker was. It's taken long enough to get these classics published over here, the least we can all do now is read them.