The Heroin Chronicles

by Jerry Stahl (Editor), Gary Phillips (Contribution by), Jervey Tervalon (Contribution by), Tony O'Neill (Contribution by), Sophia Langdon (Contribution by)

Overview

This collection of heroin stories from Eric Bogosian, Jerry Stahl, Lydia Lunch, and more “will satisfy devotees of noir fiction and outsider art alike” (Publishers Weekly).
 
On the heels of The Speed Chronicles (Sherman Alexie, William T. Vollmann, Megan Abbott, James Franco, Beth Lisick, etc.) and The Cocaine Chronicles (Lee Child, Laura Lippman, etc.) comes The Heroin Chronicles, a volume sure to frighten and delight. The literary styles of these stories are as diverse as the moral quandaries they explore.
 
From the groundbreaking novels of William S. Burroughs to the mind-altering music of The Velvet Underground, heroin—in all its ecstasy and tragedy—has been the subject of many an underground masterpiece. Collected here are all-new short stories about the infamous drug by some of today’s most celebrated and provocative writers, including Eric Bogosian, Lydia Lunch, Jerry Stahl, Nathan Larson, Ava Stander, Antonia Crane, Gary Phillips, Jervey Tervalon, John Albert, Michael Albo, Sophia Langdon, Tony O’Neill, and L.Z. Hansen.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781453297841
Publisher:	Akashic Books
Publication date:	06/01/2021
Series:	Akashic Drug Chronicles , #3
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Jerry Stahl is the author of six books, including the memoir Permanent Midnight (made into a movie with Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson) and the novels I, Fatty and Pain Killers. Formerly the culture columnist for Details, Stahl's fiction and journalism have appeared in Esquire, the New York Times, and the Believer, among other places. He has worked extensively in film and television and, most recently, wrote Hemingway & Gellhorn, starring Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman, for HBO.

Gary Phillips (b. 1955) is a critically acclaimed author of mysteries and graphic novels. Born in South Central Los Angeles, Phillips grew up reading comics and classic pulp fiction, and took inspiration from heroes like Doc Savage when he created his first series character, Ivan Monk, in the early 1990s. A private detective adept at navigating the racial tensions of modern Los Angeles, Monk has appeared in four novels and one short story collection, Monkology (2011). Phillips introduced his second series character, Martha Chainey, in High Hand (2000), and followed that rollicking tale of a showgirl’s mafia troubles with two more books. Phillips has also found success with graphic novels, penning illustrated stories inspired by classic noir and pulps. When not writing, he spends his time with his family, his dog, and an occasional cigar. Phillips continues to live and work in Los Angeles.

JERVEY TERVALON is the author of All the Trouble You Need, Understand This (winner of the 1994 New Voices Award from the Quality Paperback Book Club), and the acclaimed Los Angeles Times bestseller Dead Above Ground. In 2001, he received the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles National Literacy Award for Excellence in Multicultural Literature. He is also an award-winning poet, screenwriter, and dramatist. Currently, he’s the writer-in-residence at Pitzer College and is a California Arts Council Fellow. Jervey was born in New Orleans, raised in Los Angeles, and now lives in Altadena, California, with his wife and two daughters.

Read an Excerpt

THE HEROIN CHRONICLES

---

Akashic Books

Copyright © 2013 Akashic Books
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61775-106-6

---

Introduction

modes of desperation by jerry stahl

It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom. —Edgar Allan Poe

Somewhere, a long time ago, I wrote: All my heroes were junkies. (Hey, you pick your cliché and you run with it. That's half of life. ) So let's march 'em out. The Junkie All-Stars: Miles Davis, Lenny Bruce, Keith Richards, Billie Holliday, William S. Burroughs, even Dylan, there for a while. (Not to mention Cliff Edwards, otherwise known as Ukulele Ike, the voice of Jiminy Cricket and a lifelong addict. Junkies have all the best stories. But we'll get to that.)

Of course, Rush Limbaugh seems to have also colonized his hefty keister onto the Heavyweight Fiend list, but that's these days. (And we're not going to hoist up Herman Goering, another fat-ass fascist, and drag him around the track.) Oxycontin, known to newshounds, aficionados, and Justified fans as Hillbilly Heroin, is so much easier to acquire and imbibe than the old-fashioned nonprescription variety.

But don't get me wrong, I'm not judging Rush. A man's got to do what a man's got to do. And there is no finer cure to self-hate than determined, euphoria-inducing opiate use.

Culturally speaking—shout out to Rush again!—opiate consumption now packs all the glamour of the buttock boil that kept the right-wing rant-meister out of Vietnam. For which, perhaps, Drug Czar R. Gil Kerlikowske could issue a gold medal for yeoman service in the name of addiction prevention. And I say this with respect. Growing up, if some right-wing pork roast had morphed into our national dope fiend, I would have found another line of work and become an alcoholic. Everybody knows the difference between them: An alcoholic will steal your wallet in a blackout and apologize when he finds out. A junkie will steal it and help you look for it. Call it a matter of style, or a mode of desperation. Nothing wrong with Lost Weekend or Arthur or Days of Wine and Roses, but give me Panic in Needle Park, Man with the Golden Arm, and Requiem for a Dream any day.

Ply Mother Theresa with appletinis for three days straight and she'll crawl out the other end with dry mouth and a hangover. Shoot her up for three days and by Day Four the saint of Calcutta will be strung out like a lab monkey, ready to blow the mailman for dime-bag money. Being a junkie is not a lifestyle choice—it's an imperative of molecular chemistry.

Still, Keith, Miles, and Lenny made it look pretty cool. (Even if, one learns the hard way, Lou Reed and Bird aren't on hand to tamp your forehead with a wet towel when you're kicking. By which point it's pretty clear that heroin, at the proverbial end of the day, is about as glam as puking on your oatmeal.)

It may have been some twenty years since I've stuck a needle in my neck, but it's not like everything above it has healed up nicely. Shooting dope isn't what made me a crazy, pissed-off, outsider sleazeball and one-man crippling fear machine. Heroin just gave me an excuse. But that's me. If the short stories you are about to read in this collection are about nothing else, they're about actions—occasionally hell-driven, occasionally hilarious, uniformly desperation-and-delusion-fueled actions—the kind made by those in the grip of constant gnawing need. The entire anthology, on some level, can be viewed as an eclectic and festive encyclopedia of bad behavior.

But it's the need that makes the junkie a junkie. Even when it's not mentioned in any given story, it's there, like the weather, and it's always about to storm. Once the craving goes, the habit dissipates, but the dynamic—the Algebra of Need, as William S. Burroughs put it—remains in place. Junkies are like veterans, or bikers, or cancer survivors, or ex-cons. (Speaking just as a member of Team Dope Fiend, I don't trust anybody who hasn't been to hell. I may like you, I may even respect you, but, when the balls hit the griddle, I'd prefer somebody get my back who's had experience in my little neck of it. See, I know a guy, did a dime in Quentin. Been out twenty-three years. But even now—even now—according to his wife, he still wears prison sandals in the shower. Can't get wet barefoot. Once they've walked the yard, some men look over their shoulders their whole lives. Dope fiends, metaphorically or physically, live with their own brand of residual psychic baggage.)

When you're a junkie, you need junk to live. Everything's all on the line, all the time. Here's the thing: people know they're going to die—but junkies know what it feels like. They've kicked. Which hurts worse than death. But they know they're going to run out. It's a mind-set. No matter how big the pile on the table—junkies already see it gone. Junkies live under the Syringe of Damocles. Junkies exist as the anti-Nietzsches. Whatever doesn't kill you makes you need more dope.

Which doesn't make fiends unique—it makes them human. Just more so. Junkies feel too much. And need a lot to make them not feel.

Every writer you're about to read has been to places the "normal" human may not have been. And lived to talk about it. They haven't died for your sins. But they've felt like shit, in a variety of fascinating ways. And by the time you finish this fiction anthology, you will understand, from their pain, from their degradation, from their death-adjacent joy and skin-clawing, delirious three-a.m.-in-the-middle-of-the-day lows, the wisdom that comes from the nonstop drama and scarring comedy of living every second of your life in a race against the ticking clock of your own cells, a clock whose alarm is the sweaty, skin-scorching revelation that if you don't get what you need in three minutes your skin is going to burn and your bowels loosen, and whatever claim you had on dignity, self-respect, or power is going to drip down your leg and into your sock like the shaming wet shit of green-as-boiled-frog cold-turkey diarrhea.

Unlike serial killers or traditional torturers, junkies spend most of their time savaging themselves. That everyone they know and love in the world is often destroyed in the process is just a side issue. C.A.D. Collateral Addict Damage. And yet.

From this festive and inelegant hell, these junkie writers—some ex, some not-so-ex, but a good editor never tells—have returned with a kind of sclerosed wisdom. Their burning lives may lie scattered behind them like the remains of a plane crash in an open field, but the flames will, I guarantee, illuminate the lives of any and all who read it, whether addicted to dope, Jim Beam, gun shows, bus station sex, Mars bars, Texas Hold'em, telenovellas, fame or—thank you, Jesus, Lord of Weird Redemption—great fucking writing.

Jerry Stahl Los Angeles, CA September 2012

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from THE HEROIN CHRONICLES Copyright © 2013 by Akashic Books. Excerpted by permission of Akashic Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• PART I: REALITY BLURS
  • Fragments of Joe
  • Hot for the Shot
  • Dos Mac + The Jones
  • Possible Side Effects
• PART II: SURRENDER TO THE VOID
  • Going Down
  • Baby, I Need to See a Man about a Duck
  • Godhead
  • Gift Horse
• PART III: GETTING A GRIP
  • Ghost Town
  • The Monster
  • Black Caesar’s Gold
  • Sunshine for Adrienne
  • Poppy Love
• Copyright Page

Editorial Reviews

The third and finest Akashic entry yet in its Drug Chronicles series (after The Speed Chronicles and The Cocaine Chronicles) focuses on the enigmatic opium poppy and its various derivatives. Whether it’s black tar heroin or Oxycontin (aka “hillbilly heroin”), opiates have a long literary heritage, from Coleridge and Baudelaire to Burroughs and Donald Goines. As the 13 contributors to this all-original anthology reveal, those who partake of the sacred flower are forever changed, but the price of paradise is often steep: overdose, hepatitis C, soul-crushing depression and anxiety when in withdrawal, degradation, self-destruction. Stahl (Permanent Midnight), himself a recovering addict with long-term sobriety, has assembled an impressive array of writers to create this “encyclopedia of bad behavior.” Indeed, these tales of chasing the dragon, with corollaries often violent and savage, will satisfy devotees of noir fiction and outsider art alike. Standouts include Tony O’Neill’s “Fragments of Joe,” L.Z. Hansen’s “Going Down,” Sophia Langdon’s “Hot for the Shot,” Gary Phillips’s “Black Caesar’s Gold,” not to mention Stahl’s own “Possible Side Effects.” (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"The Heroin Chronicles, the third entry in the [Akashic Drug Chronicles] series, is the finest so far—a collection of short fiction that puts this series on the same must-read category as the Noir Series . . . The Heroin Chronicles is full of stories about suffering, survival, overdoses, hepatitis C, poverty, self-loathing, humiliation, danger, death, degradation, guns, and self-destruction. They’re all told with unflinching sincerity by authors who have either been there or extremely close to it. If you’re familiar with the Drug Chronicles, you know saying this is the best one yet is saying a lot. If you’re not familiar with the series, this is the definitely the book to start with."

Verbicide Magazine

"The Heroin Chronicles conveys the sentiment that a life of heroin addiction is a human comedy, but it will usually end in dark or, even worse, banal tragedy."

MysteryPeople

"Not every junkie can write. And not every writer is a junkie. Stahl has assembled a fine roster of ballsy writers who tip their hats in respect to the junkie writer masters who came before them."

Front & Centre (Canada)

"Desperate, degrading, wise, witty, these tales of addiction encompass family struggles, failed relationships, dirty sex, overdoses, and the constant drive for drugs that fuels each vein-digging author. Dispelling myths about the glamour of self-destruction, Stahl has chosen stories that are raw and real, focusing on the often bleak hopelessness of addiction, a life lived day to day with the next high as the only real motivator. And though Stahl is secretive about how many of his contributors are clean, still using, or in recovery, each narrative demonstrates a remarkable self-awareness, a revealing tone that allows readers to relate to addiction, even if they have never picked up a needle themselves."
—Interview Magazine

"This is a tough crew in these pages, but you will find them human and vulnerable, perhaps more so than your average 'normal' functioning being. 'Junkies are like veterans,' Stahl writes, 'or bikers, or cancer survivors, or ex-cons.'...With this posse in tow, Jerry has no need to worry. They have been to the depths and, like Dante on the wrong road, come back to enthrall you."
—New Pages

"Not every junkie can write. And not every writer is a junkie. Stahl has assembled a fine roster of ballsy writers who tip their hats in respect to the junkie writer masters who came before them."
—Front & Centre (Canada)

"Akashic Books once again pushes the boundaries with the newest addition of the Drug Chronicles, The Heroin Chronicles...This book is out there, man. The stories are funny, sad, true-to-life, and most of all eye-opening...These stories are chaotically beautiful and they will draw you to the authors, forcing you to look for more of their work."
—Examiner.com

From the Publisher

Editor Stahl (Permanent Midnight) has put forth a gritty, naked collection of short stories on the bleak life of heroin addicts. These tales by such edgy literary writers as Gary Phillips, Lydia Lunch, and Nathan Larson give different voices to the same affliction and do not romanticize the lifestyle or bodily side effects of the drug. While the stories obviously center around current or past users of heroin, they are told from different perspectives and from different economic spheres that keep the stories fresh and above comparison. Stahl quotes William Burroughs, who sums up the anthology quite nicely: "it's not the heroin that'll kill you, it's the lifestyle." VERDICT A highly graphic and sometimes grotesque read, this anthology will be enjoyed by those who have read the other series titles, The Cocaine Chronicles and The Speed Chronicles. Readers of graphic crime noir would also be interested in this anthology, as some of the stories tend to cross over into the criminal element as well.—Jennifer Funk, McKendree Univ. Lib., Lebanon, IL

Library Journal