The use of literary devices on this piece of excellent literature was very strong. First of all the were parts of this novel where you thought you were in New York's infamous Five Points the early 1900's. Asbury's use of imagry was just amazing. He made you think you were in a scene with all of the description he used. Even if it was one of those scenes where you were overcome with sadness and possibly even anger from the more grapic events of this novel. The characters were based on real life people who lived in that time period and the fit in awesome with the story. There was the typical evil stock character of "The Butcher." He fit in perfect with the overall felling of this book, which is one none of us would like to be involved in. The topic of it is gangs and life when things are not going so well. So obviosly the are going to be unfortunite things that happen. The tone of this novel was a very serious one with gore and violent death, and one could tell that Asbury wanted you to know this type of things really did happen. This leads to the theme which is loyality. The fact he writes about gangs is a symbol of unity. With there being death and murder involved then comes authorities. In most of the cases the gang members would rather die than be a 'rat', which would come with harsher and more brutal punishment. That summerized is loyality.