cover image Drugs

Drugs

J.R. Helton. Seven Stories, $15.95 trade paper (256p) ISBN 978-1-60980-401-5

Helton fails to follow the creative writing 101 admonishment to "show, don't tell" in this part faux-memoir, part social critique. Mundane details of drug acquisition are endlessly recounted with the timbre of a shopping list: "I spent thousands of dollars on this drug which cost then about 100 dollars a gram, or three hundred bucks for an eightball." As a teenager, the narrator and protagonist, Jake, begins with the requisite gateway joints, while avoiding landscaping work and driving around 1980s Texas subdivisions. By chapter 2, he's onto coke; chapter 3, methadone; chapter 11, Oxycontin, and so on down the road for several decades. Girls come and go and the drugs evolve with the times, but Jake's life and Helton's prose remains flat and exhausting. In an entire book dedicated to drug use, one would hope for some urgency, surreal tenderness, compelling danger or%E2%80%94at the very least%E2%80%94the cheap thrill of superficial glamour. Unfortunately, readers won't find any of that here; R. Crumb's illustrated cover is the best part. (May)