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Written nearly half a century ago, Merle Molofsky's novel is a wild, relentless ride into the fever dreams and delusions, fears and fantasies, violence and pathos of a gallery of drug addicts, bent on lives of unquiet desperation. It is no more driven by the conventions of plot or character “development” than are the hallucinatory fictions of William S. Burroughs or Hubert Selby, Jr., whose nightmarish descents into urban hells detonated within America's subculture during the very era in which young Merle sketched the damaged psyches that stumble through her book. The specter of death is everywhere, but nowhere does it spell climax or closure or even palpable threat; its reality is no less denied and surreal than everything else in this world of users and whores, needles and scores, highs and lows, blood and vomit, in which the reader is immersed.
Though largely composed in the third person, no omniscient, godlike perspective provides excuses, offers solace, or bestows judgment. Cunning slides in and out of the first person reflect both the instability of identity from which certain characters suffer and the lack of self-reflection that ensues. In their place is the groping need for the next sensation, however fleeting, less to enhance consciousness or sustain pleasure than to annihilate the pain of existence, to disappear into nothingness. When God or Jesus is evoked, it is not with hope of redemption; they are simply the most convenient objects of the raging addict's anger, despair, and self-pity. The immediacy of the prose as it grapples with these experiences is not so much the fly-on-the-wall approach as the