Read as part of CBR 16 Bingo: dreams. One of the main characters consistently has dreams that impact the plot of the story.
CN: This book has many references to suicide, sometimes graphically. I won’t go into detail here but it’s impossible to review without mentioning it. If that’s something that makes you uncomfortable, sit this one out.
Like many a child of the 80s and 90s, I’m a product of DARE’s Just Say No Culture. I never did drugs, was terrified of them as a young person, and had a moral objection to anyone who partook. Nowadays, my morals have mellowed, I’m mostly ok with drugs, I certainly don’t think one should go to jail for them, I certainly will not judge anyone reading this for partaking in them…and yet, I still don’t mess with them.
It could be because I’ve lost so many high school classmates to drug/opioid ODs. Or because I just don’t want to kill off any brain cells that alcohol left behind. They’re just not for me. I’m too old for an experimental phase.
With that in mind, narratives with heavy drug use are tough. Especially when young people are involved. I get the “story” (heavy quotes here as there’s not much of one) Yeager is trying to tell: the youths are doing drugs because they live in a depressed mill town where nothing is going on and everyone is offing themselves. But I’m reminded why these kinds of stories are often not for me.
It also doesn’t help that while the three POV characters are interesting enough, their lives and the story revolve around one annoying-as-f creep who reminds me of every High School Band Anarcho-Toxic Penis Head I went to high school with. I’m sure many of you know the type: the one who plays bad music at coffee houses on Friday nights and complains about their dad for reasons that are never clear. The one who looks like he never showers but gets all the romantic attention nonetheless. I kept wishing these folks would find their own paths in life and stay far, far away from a character that was annoying at best and uninteresting at worst.
Yet the book actually does thrive when it focuses less on what anti-social, inert, pilled-up weirdos these folks are and more when it engages with the weirdness of the story. The visions, the town lore, the occult, the surrealism, the thin line between dreams and reality…the good stuff. It’s why I picked this up. This is kind of a Twin Peaks written by a Gen Zer who has an unhealthy knowledge of pill combinations and their resulting side effects. The critique of America, of internet culture, of what drugs do to kids is spot on. But it doesn’t come together well enough to make a decent book.
A weird (wyrd as they say across the pond) book I read last year and loved that plays with similar themes is Tariq Goddard’s High John the Conqueror, which I highly recommend.