Cowards

Mitch Slaughter, the drummer of a painfully hip Seattle band named the Otis Process, calls himself a ""junkie's joke and a cop's good day--a lower-middle-class white dope fiend."" Mitch and his friends and bandmates abuse all forms of recreational drugs: pot, acid, cocaine speedballs, crystal meth and, above all, heroin. For a while, the Otis Process (named, appropriately, after a dead San Francisco junkie) manages to keep the wheels from flying off. The band attracts the attention of a recording studio rep, cuts a couple of tracks for a compilation CD and signs on for a cross-country, multi-band tour. On a more personal level, Mitch, often the soberest of the lot, stumbles into a relationship with an itinerant fortune-teller, Etta. The off-center, however, cannot hold, and before long the band's gigs, once a ""peaceful scene,"" more often resemble a ""sick slam dance gone awry."" Their behavior is disturbing enough that the organizers drop them from the tour and the record label rejects them. By the time Etta disappears with the band's van, bandmembers are overdosing left and right, and even stoned-out Mitch can see that it may be time for him to move on. Burgess is apparently angry enough to have something primal to communicate, intelligent enough to assemble it compellingly and verbally fluent enough to make it sing--at times. These talents are not sustained throughout his first novel, however. There is simply too much unwashed edge in both the characters and story to make this anything more than an undisciplined torrent of guitar reverb sprinkled with an occasionally sparkling riff. (May)