Black Hole
A Novel
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
There are no old drug addicts. That's what everyone says, at least. So how did Chuck get to his forty-third birthday and find himself still neck-deep in this scene? He knows he's the creepy old guy with the drugs or the guy who's too old to be at the party doing everyone else's drugs, but if it ain't broke ... Well, he manages to make it to work at the dwarf whale distributor every day. He may hate that his dearly seedy San Francisco has become overrun with Starbucks, startups, and Lululemon moms, but he makes do every month for the rent-controlled apartment he shares with roommates he never sees. It's not perfect, but it's livable.
In the end, though, every addict has that one special vice that can tip them from relatively functional to completely unhinged. For Chuck, it's a new drug that doesn't even have a name yet; it's just a smokable, everlasting gobstopper of mellow high. But when chunks of time begin to disappear and rearrange themselves , he wonders if this really is just another life-ruining drug or if it's something straight out of a Philip K. Dick universe. Word on the street is that this
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This scabrously funny novel is a character study of a badly aging punk whose prime motivation in life is his voracious appetite for drugs. Chuck, who is 43 and lives in San Francisco's Mission District, works part-time trafficking cloned "mini-whales" for over-privileged yuppies and techies ("Pets are the new accessories"), while scarfing every pill and powder that he can consume. When he scores some Black Hole, "a synthetic, smokeable speedball" that mysteriously never diminishes in quantity even when consumed, he appears to have found his dream drug that is, until his grip on the space-time continuum starts to slip. Chuck's days are an endless succession of waking up in unfamiliar places in various states of undress, and he crosses paths regularly with a zany cast of supporting characters that includes steroidal bodybuilders, fellow heads, and a former NSA agent brain-cleansed by psychedelics. Throughout his adventures he weighs in regularly as a poet-philosopher, serving up observational gems on drug addiction ("Home is where your drugs are"), contemporary culture ("No one wants things because they want them, they want things to show the world what they can afford"), and the way urban gentrification has neutered society's tolerance for outrageous lifestyles. Reading about his crazy antics is a heady experience in its own right.
