Jerry Stahl is one of our last defenders against the darkness and Happy Mutant Baby Pills is a deeply funny and devastating warning label for the world we live in, a world that is ultimately, as Stahl brilliantly demonstrates, one giant side effect.” — Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask
“A dope-fueled hellride to the black heart of New Weird America. Stahl turns his satirical scalpel on Big Pharma, environmental contamination, conspiracy theorists, the Occupy movement, CSI, Christian swingles, and adult babies, eviscerating our silly/scary society in search of its soul. Profoundly disturbing, profoundly funny, and profoundly moving.” — Richard Lange, author of Angel Baby and Dead Boys
“No one can make me laugh while kicking me down the dark tunnel of self like Jerry Stahl.” — Marc Maron
“Jerry Stahl squirts forth another brutal and hilarious masterpiece of literary burlesque. Happy Mutant Baby Pills is so good it hurts.” ” — Lydia Lunch
“Every copy of this book should come with a box of Depends® because the reader will be wetting himself laughing. If there is such a thing as truth, Jerry Stahl has it hostage.” — Eric Bogosian
“A better-than-Burroughs virtuoso.” — New Yorker
“Stahl’s brilliantly demented riffs deserve to be read—or screamed—aloud.” — Entertainment Weekly
“If you happen to have a deeply twisted sense of what’s funny, Stahl will tickle.” — Los Angeles Times
“Jerry Stahl’s work fills the gap in American literature left void since the death of the late, great Terry Southern.” — Jim Carroll
“Jerry Stahl is the American hipster bard.” — James Ellroy
“Jerry Stahl should either get the Pulitzer Prize or be shot down in the street like a dog.” — Anthony Bourdain
“Jerry Stahl is truly twisted, truly gifted.” — Legs McNeil
“It is one thing, fine and rare, to write from the heart. It is another thing, finer and rarer, to write from the secret unutterable chambers of the heart. Jerry Stahl, whose words are as cool and deadly striking as a cottonmouth, does just that. — Nick Tosches
“Jerry Stahl’s writing will flip you—flip you for real.” — Benicio Del Toro
“With read-aloud quality prose and characters we can’t look away from, Happy Mutant Baby Pills is a deeply disturbing, deeply funny look at a society desperately in need of assistance.” — Booklist
A dope-fueled hellride to the black heart of New Weird America. Stahl turns his satirical scalpel on Big Pharma, environmental contamination, conspiracy theorists, the Occupy movement, CSI, Christian swingles, and adult babies, eviscerating our silly/scary society in search of its soul. Profoundly disturbing, profoundly funny, and profoundly moving.
Jerry Stahl is one of our last defenders against the darkness and Happy Mutant Baby Pills is a deeply funny and devastating warning label for the world we live in, a world that is ultimately, as Stahl brilliantly demonstrates, one giant side effect.
A better-than-Burroughs virtuoso.
No one can make me laugh while kicking me down the dark tunnel of self like Jerry Stahl.
Jerry Stahl squirts forth another brutal and hilarious masterpiece of literary burlesque. Happy Mutant Baby Pills is so good it hurts.”
If you happen to have a deeply twisted sense of what’s funny, Stahl will tickle.
Every copy of this book should come with a box of Depends® because the reader will be wetting himself laughing. If there is such a thing as truth, Jerry Stahl has it hostage.
Jerry Stahl’s work fills the gap in American literature left void since the death of the late, great Terry Southern.
Stahl’s brilliantly demented riffs deserve to be read—or screamed—aloud.
Jerry Stahl is the American hipster bard.
Jerry Stahl’s writing will flip you—flip you for real.
It is one thing, fine and rare, to write from the heart. It is another thing, finer and rarer, to write from the secret unutterable chambers of the heart. Jerry Stahl, whose words are as cool and deadly striking as a cottonmouth, does just that.
Jerry Stahl should either get the Pulitzer Prize or be shot down in the street like a dog.
With read-aloud quality prose and characters we can’t look away from, Happy Mutant Baby Pills is a deeply disturbing, deeply funny look at a society desperately in need of assistance.
Jerry Stahl is truly twisted, truly gifted.
If you happen to have a deeply twisted sense of what’s funny, Stahl will tickle.
A better-than-Burroughs virtuoso.
With read-aloud quality prose and characters we can’t look away from, Happy Mutant Baby Pills is a deeply disturbing, deeply funny look at a society desperately in need of assistance.
2013-08-15
Stahl's (Pain Killers, 2009, etc.) eighth novel trips through the travails of Lloyd, copywriter and heroin junkie. And what a trip it is: ribald, tumbling through a don't-look-back narrative, laced with rude, wicked and beyond-the-edge social observations. Lloyd is "[a]nother doomed DeLillo with a day job," a career path spiraling downward from writing sanitized pharmaceutical side effects warnings through Penthouse Forum fake letters to disingenuous shills for Christian Swingles, a dating site. Lloyd is fueled by heroin, his maintenance drug after a career of "Plexiglas-cut crack, questionable E, bathtub crank." It's only self-destructive until he's conned into a fake robbery by Swingle cohorts and then exiled by Greyhound from Tulsa to LA. In transit, he meets Nora, a "buxom bad-attitude pixie...and...wanna-martyr." Nora's paranoia seduces him into murder; her addicting sexuality prompts him to commit another. In LA, Lloyd signs on as a writer specializing in sexual perversion deaths for the CSI franchise. What appears to be a sendup of big pharma, television from Bruckheimer to Oprah, genetically modified organisms, Christian dating, Oral Roberts and the greeting card industry then veers into eco-surrealism. Nora claims pregnancy, the sire, a high-powered CEO, and after a quick segue into the foibles of Occupy-rallying LA hippies, Nora begins ingesting chemicals--"half the sprays and solvents in the household cleaning aisle, along with enough of the Physicians' Desk Reference to fill the trunk of a Buick." Nora intends to birth a mutant baby--"a message, a global warning, a kind of toxic inoculation of the entire species." No cheers are due Lloyd or Nora, and supporting characters are equally deformed, including former Christian Swingle workmates Jay and Riegle, a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern pairing fantasizing about riding Nora's pregnancy into reality television wealth. A grotesque and lurid allegorical tale, this is not for the faint of heart. Bukowski spawned the School of Dirty Realism. Consider this Dirty Surrealism, social satire as aberrant hipster irony.
