Currently I'm finishing 'Down and Out on Murder Mile,' by Tony O'Neill. I bought this book without knowing much about it, other than I loved the elongated design, something rarely used in fiction. It's shaped like a Zagat's essentially, and while the photo above is in red, the version I have is a piercing yellow that zapped me right into reading the dust jacket copy. A story about addiction, Tony O'Neill was formerly a member of the Brian Jonestown Massacre and Marc Almond's band - Marc Almond being the man who sang 'Tainted Love' with Soft Cell, one of my all time '80s pop hit favorites. Between my admiration of the book's design, and my interest in musicians and their silly lives, I was sold.
Stories about addiction are hard to tell in an original fashion, as they have been explored and excavated pretty thoroughly at this point. I wouldn't say O'Neill puts any new gloss on the narrative - male junkie marries desperate female junkie, junkie couple scores a lot of heroin, crack, coke, and methadone (at their severe peril), spiral into darkness, and are then forced to fight for their lives. If you've ever ready any Hubert Selby Jr. or William Burroughs, you get the general gist. That's not to say that O'Neill's book isn't entertaining - it's well written with a lot of energy and style, and it certainly flies by. Generous spacing and narrow pages make this the type of book you can read in a couple days.
In the end, however, it is what it is - a junkie story, and mined, I would think, quite significantly from O'Neill's personal experience. Our anti-hero is an intelligent, fiercely loyal sometimes musician who, at 24, is starting to get very concerned about the waste he's made of his life. I imagine O'Neill didn't have to dig very deep to access that mindset.
If the lesson here is 'don't do heroin, don't do crack, don't end up a slave to the methadone clinic and the attendant asshole doctor who runs it,' I'm not sure I needed to read 'Down and Out on Murder Mile' in order to learn that. At the same time, I found it diverting, energetic, and ultimately enjoyable, despite my laborious bitching above.
Take that for what you will...
jD
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