Drugs

A modern homage to William S. Burrough’s classic Junky, the new novel Drugs is the sparse, beautifully unassuming account of one man’s life of drug use.

As Robert Crumb, who illustrated the book jacket, says,

“J. R. Helton really speaks to me—starkly honest, darkly funny, acutely observant, and captures the tragic absurdity of human life. . . . [H]e’s right up there with the best of them.”

This fictionalized memoir is told in masterfully wry, Spartan prose with no apologies for a drug-user’s lifestyle, and instead looks back on it with clever insight and an appreciation for everything felt and observed. With self-awareness and conviction, Helton avoids the sensationalist commentary so common to drug memoirs and instead favors the honest details, the effects of each drug on his body and on his soul. The result is a sincerely told tale of adventure, debauchery, and absurdity.

"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 — at the very least — the cheap thrill of superficial glamour. Unfortunately, readers won't find any of that here; R. Crumb's illustrated cover is the best part. (May)" Publishers Weekly Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

J.R. Helton has been writing for thirty years. He has published a number of short stories, as well as the memoirs Below the Line and Man and Beast. A French collection of his work,  Au Texas Tu Serais Deja Mort, was published in March 2011 by 13e Note Editions in Paris. He lives in Texas.