Book Review: Jackpot

Jackpot: The Dread Skinhead. Jabari Adisa, Hardstyle Fiction, August 2025, paperback and e-book, 367 pages.

Reviewed by Ken Korber.

"Jackpot: The Dread Skinhead", by Jabari Adisa, has garnered some literary attention for its gritty, raw and unfiltered portrayal of the Skinhead lifestyle in 1980s Chicago – and not the clichés you’ve seen in movies. The reader is brought into the real thing, the way it was lived by the author.

This is the poetry of skinhead drama the world never saw coming. It reads like a secret world initiation, capturing the complexity of gang codes and the ways gang members live in this world – with all the associated consequences. 

The reader is given permission to navigate this Chicago world with the likes of Baby Lion, Puma, Tremor, Nico and others, in a format often characterized as “Hardstyle Fiction”.  We learn about the sharp-dressed soldiers of the South Side, pavement patriots, brutal street politics, and some underground movements that never made the history books. 

Jackpot didn’t set out to be a soldier in the war for Chicago’s soul. Raised in Englewood and shaped by the militant energy of Terror Town, he learns early how to read the city’s shifting allegiances. By his teens, he’s deep in the skinhead underground — sliding between reggae-fueled Lion Order gatherings, backroom radicalism, and the razor’s edge of street survival. 

But when his closest friend Brixton (a London transplant with his own Rude Boy pedigree), meets tragedy, Jackpot is forced to confront everything he’s avoided: the invisible lines that divide a 1980’s dying city, the violent calculus of power, and the creeping presence of a shadowy cult. 

The author has said “I write subcultural fiction where code is sacred, survival is earned, and rebellion runs deep”. And his raison d’etre is “to document the unrecorded, to mythologize the overlooked, and to honor the code beneath the chaos”. 

Throughout this linguistic journey, the reader feels the relentless rhythm of the street and the raw urgency of cult horror between the book’s covers. 

 Jackpot: The Dread Skinhead is a novel about identity, survival, and the cost of transformation; in a city torn by beliefs, betrayals, and gang code.