The book tells the story of a decade that embraces the ennui of being broke and homeless in Los Angeles, jetting in and out of clinics and treatment centers, shelters, and AA meetings. This Outsider is at odds with dealers, doctors with agendas, priests handing out redemption, creepy casting directors, and teachers with lessons too hard to learn. We encounter children at the door wanting only candy, but getting more than they bargained for, enfeebled and enraged landlords, plus complex girlfriends turned escorts and Kafkaesque rabbits that rescue. An addict with a life-saving charm, the protagonist pulls scams, crashes social events, and impersonates employees - whatever it takes to impress, to ingratiate and to get the next fix. His refuge is the interior world of drug-induced fantasies poised on the precipice of a fall into real memory and the imminent loss and waste, the spectral accompaniment to the addled life of addiction; a phantasmagoria of layered symbolism and imagery in the production of a unique vision somewhere this side of reality.

Part Odyssey, part Fear and Loathing, this is a modern day voyage into the heart of darkness of isolation, a Gen-X coming-of-age tale while shaking it rough on the mean streets, of whatever city opened itself up and represented a possible but ultimately doomed fresh start. Spurning the usual gloom and doom of the addiction-recovery genre, this book vibrates with a manic and surreal energy and an astonishing facility with language, pushing it into the realm of narrative’s most extreme and playful possibilities. This novel may be the first example of a self-crafted magical realism rooted in North American popular culture, one in the tradition of Kubla Khan. These meditations in the tradition of Coleridge unfold in a theater of the absurd, forging a kind of William Burroughs situation-comedy-of-club-kids, driven through the narrator’s world to a place where the reader wonders if it’s truly happening in the present or is a wished for kaleidoscopic dream state.