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Junkie Love
A nice, nasty read. I enjoyed it a lot. —Nick Cave
Set in Camden Town, London, during the late 1980s, Junkie Love is a study of addiction and loss, a nihilistic love story for the blank generation. Focusing on the psycho-pathology of addiction, it takes a look at what happens when hope disappears and hedonism turns to despair and self-loathing. The characters in this tale are rootless and adrift, dislocated from their pasts with no belief in the aims and aspirations of a materialistic society. Instead of turning to politics or religion, they embark on a course of self-destructive sex and manically obsessive drug abuse, a journey to the end of the night from which many do not return. Largely autobiographical and leavened with irony and perverse humor, Junkie Love follows the protagonist into the heart of this morass to the point where corruption and dissipation coalesce into something approaching transcendence.
Set in Camden Town, London, during the late 1980s, Junkie Love is a study of addiction and loss, a nihilistic love story for the blank generation. Focusing on the psycho-pathology of addiction, it takes a look at what happens when hope disappears and hedonism turns to despair and self-loathing. The characters in this tale are rootless and adrift, dislocated from their pasts with no belief in the aims and aspirations of a materialistic society. Instead of turning to politics or religion, they embark on a course of self-destructive sex and manically obsessive drug abuse, a journey to the end of the night from which many do not return. Largely autobiographical and leavened with irony and perverse humor, Junkie Love follows the protagonist into the heart of this morass to the point where corruption and dissipation coalesce into something approaching transcendence.
148 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2001
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April 3, 2023
See full review on Thor Garcia's goodreads.com blog.
The Shoenfelt of Junkie Love plunges from one level of hell to the next, stubbornly clinging to hope and reason even as his cravings for dope and control careen inexorably toward an apocalypse of despair, violence and dysfunction.
As in Shoenfelt’s songs, the shadow of death—likely soon and abrupt—towers over these threadbare souls. And love—that great Shoenfeltian “holy and beautific light,” as this text puts it—has inevitably been almost completely snuffed out. In the end, hopes for better days hang from a mere glint of silver lining.
Shoenfelt consigns most of the desperate and doomed inmates of Junkie Love to the misery of progressive spiritual and physical decimation—including, most sensationally and devastatingly, Cissy, the plot’s prime mover and the narrator’s main passion (other than dope, that is). The excellently drawn Cissy plays out as obsessive love interest and archenemy—as abuse victim and troublemaker—as scapegoat and tragic figure—as a dynamic presence the narrator uses to explain and rationalize his own cock-ups and torment.
The rather rollicking tale—mostly written after Shoenfelt moved to Prague in the mid-1990s—boasts a murderer’s row of other rogues and “daft cunts,” including Scottish Dougie (the clear-cut “villain” of the piece), Dodgy Dave, Bela the Italian, Jed the Biker, Andy, Julia, Jimmy, Pete, Ali, Somerstown Sammy (also known as “Whisper”), JC (“the sound engineer of a well-known Australian rock band”), as well as Vikki, “a beautiful English-Chinese girl from Bristol.”
Shoenfelt’s narrator, “Phil,” is a lost man of unclear background, a calculating conniver whose weaknesses and vulnerabilities prod him toward boneheaded behavior that eventually turns wicked. Phil’s got few scruples against stealing or massaging the truth in the interest of obtaining his fix or getting a leg up in the dealer wars. Unlike Junkie Love’s other characters, however, Shoenfelt bequeaths Phil with a vague suggestion of possible redemption—something Shoenfelt often does with the characters of his songs.
Shoenfelt has stated that Junkie Love should not be regarded as a memoir but as a novel based on his nearly decade-long experience as a heroin/substance abuser in New York City and London in the 1980s. This era is now recognized as a time in which hard drug abuse by ordinary people in the West exploded to unprecedented levels.
Phil is stingy with information about his own background but is extravagant with info about Cissy. We learn she grew up in New York and Iran and was dispatched to a boarding school in Switzerland[6] after her father disappeared from the scene when she was 13. In Tehran, her Iranian grandfather sexually assaulted her, while “an older boy from the American school” introduced her to the pleasures of smoking opium. Her mother seems to have been helpless amidst all of it. Cissy had not become the “perfect little Persian princess that her mother had dreamed of,” but instead a young woman ready to enter the “dark and treacherous waters of big-time drug-dealing”—in search of wealth and status, “beholden to no-one.”
But as Phil explains: “Cissy was, behind the façade, the original, wide-eyed, little girl-lost alone in the big, bad world. She had no idea of the sinister forces she was playing with, and that were about to rain down upon her dreaming, innocent head.”
Just 18 and on her own in London, Cissy was hitting the party/club scene, making her own clothes and selling her own handmade jewelry from a stall in Portobello Market. What better time, then, for an ambitious (if troubled) young lass like Cissy to take up with Scottish Dougie, “a Glaswegian hard man of the old school, about thirty years of age”? Dougie, who’d already served time for offenses ranging from armed robbery to GBH, was built like the “proverbial brick shit-house,” had a three-inch knife scar on one side of his face and “a flattened, almost ape-like appearance” due to his nose having been broken multiple times.
“Things started to go wrong almost from the start,” Phil says—and it isn’t long before Cissy is sentenced to prison after getting corralled in a drug bust that may have been set in motion by her bragging to acquaintances about how well her drug-dealing career was going. Cissy would end up doing two years in the can. This “effectively pulled the plug on Cissy’s career as a social climber and bon vivant,” says Phil. Dougie would be sentenced to seven years.
But all the while, both are increasingly dizzy from the cravings. They’re losing ground to their joneses—to the Big H, the hibernating addiction monster purring within. Phil goes into a tizzy after he discovers, during their visit to the Reading Music Festival, that Cissy’s secretly been using again. How could she be so dumb and reckless? Deep down, however, “ex-addict” Phil—who, by the way, has been doing “more and more speed in order to keep awake” while driving his T-shirt truck around London—feels left out.
Phil tries to discourage Cissy but she is truculent—she tells Phil to butt out of what is clearly her own issue. From this point on, the bad decisions start flying at a side-splitting LOL—even ROFL—pace.
One of the strengths of Junkie Love is the window it offers into the mental processes of the addict. Out of his overwhelming desire to be with Cissy (or so he tells himself), Phil decides that, clearly, the best move would be for him to return to his old profession of drug dealer—and for both of them to move into a Camden Road squat occupied by other junkies.
Page 56: “But I was all fired up, and brushed Cissy’s reservations aside—there was no way I was going to get back into using again, of that I was sure.”
Page 61: “As if in a dream, I tied-off and got a vein up almost immediately, ‘Ol’ Faithful’ in the crook of my left arm, and as I stuck the needle in I almost shit myself in anticipation. The rush was incredible. I thought I was going to pass out, it was so intense, a spreading white light that warmed every cell and nerve-ending in my body, and that felt like the best one hundred orgasms I’d ever had, all rolled into one.”
Page 62: “I knew that I’d fucked up by getting high, but what was most worrying was that I had no real awareness of how it had actually happened. No conscious decision had been taken. I had moved as if under the control of some power alien to me, like a sleep-walker; and it suddenly seemed that this whole idea I’d concocted of weaning Cissy away from her habit was merely a pretext that my unconscious mind had formulated for getting back into close contact with heroin once again. I was aware of a hidden part of me that had its own agenda of secret appetites and desires, that moved of its own volition and took no account of ‘me’ at all. I could feel it inside, working away, moving silently along its own invisible tracks; and not only that, it was much stronger than me—of this, I was totally sure.”
Any semblance of “control” rapidly vanishes. One day, Cissy disappears with the “money and the methadone,” and it is weeks before Phil sees her again. During her time out of Phil’s sight, Cissy somehow has a reunion with Scottish Dougie. That’s right, Dougie is out of prison and back on the streets.
When Cissy tells Phil that “I can’t be together with you anymore, it’s just not gonna work out,” and that Dougie told her that he contracted HIV from sharing dirty needles, Phil loses whatever tenuous grip he had on civilized behavior. He has become a mad dog, practically begging to be taken out of his misery.
Shoenfelt pulverizes in a passage that left this reviewer stunned and breathless. The possible uses of literature—the whole farking point of it all—haven’t seemed the same since:
“Cissy looked at me in disbelief for a moment, then her face twisted in contempt. I saw the punch coming, but made no attempt to dodge it, and her tiny fist slammed into my mouth, actually drawing blood. All the uncertainty, pain and frustration of the previous few weeks welled up inside me, and without stopping to think, I punched her right back. . . .”
The break leads to Phil and Cissy running separate drug-dealing operations inside the Camden Town squat. Cissy sells “smack, cocaine and speed from her room downstairs,” “surrounded by six or seven pale-faced young guys. Junkie castratos in the court of Queen Cissy.”
Each day, as well, death seems to be moving closer. Cissy gets roughed up by some guys after an expensive deal goes wrong. They threaten to slash her throat. She survives but with two black eyes and her “prized hair-extensions” snipped off. Phil sells gear to Roy, who then proceeds to overdose in Phil’s room. Roy survives thanks to some quick thinking by Sid, who gives him mouth-to-mouth and CPR while Phil gives him a salt injection.
The finale sees Phil face-to-face with “Brian,” a visitor to the squat who has overdosed. Someone has tried to revive Brian by removing his clothes and giving him a cold bath, but Brian has complicated things by evacuating his bowels. The person who tried to help him has left. Phil discovers Brian unconscious in a bathtub full of frigid water and his own shit.
After helping to save Brian’s life (that flash of silver lining), Phil announces: “Me . . . I’m through with the junkie life. I can’t afford and can’t be bothered to wait around any longer. . . . I’m bailing out of the sinking ship. . . . . I just feel so heartily sick, tired and bored of the whole fucking deal that I might even succeed, this time, in staying off smack for good.”
Junkie Love must be regarded as the foundational prose text in the field of Shoenfelt studies. It is crucial to a deeper understanding of Shoenfelt’s experience and worldview—and key to a keener insight into the artistic persona behind powerful, essential albums like Backwoods Crucifixion, God Is the Other Face of the Devil, Blue Highway and Flowers for Alice.
See full review on Thor Garcia's goodreads.com blog.
View all my reviews
The Shoenfelt of Junkie Love plunges from one level of hell to the next, stubbornly clinging to hope and reason even as his cravings for dope and control careen inexorably toward an apocalypse of despair, violence and dysfunction.
As in Shoenfelt’s songs, the shadow of death—likely soon and abrupt—towers over these threadbare souls. And love—that great Shoenfeltian “holy and beautific light,” as this text puts it—has inevitably been almost completely snuffed out. In the end, hopes for better days hang from a mere glint of silver lining.
Shoenfelt consigns most of the desperate and doomed inmates of Junkie Love to the misery of progressive spiritual and physical decimation—including, most sensationally and devastatingly, Cissy, the plot’s prime mover and the narrator’s main passion (other than dope, that is). The excellently drawn Cissy plays out as obsessive love interest and archenemy—as abuse victim and troublemaker—as scapegoat and tragic figure—as a dynamic presence the narrator uses to explain and rationalize his own cock-ups and torment.
The rather rollicking tale—mostly written after Shoenfelt moved to Prague in the mid-1990s—boasts a murderer’s row of other rogues and “daft cunts,” including Scottish Dougie (the clear-cut “villain” of the piece), Dodgy Dave, Bela the Italian, Jed the Biker, Andy, Julia, Jimmy, Pete, Ali, Somerstown Sammy (also known as “Whisper”), JC (“the sound engineer of a well-known Australian rock band”), as well as Vikki, “a beautiful English-Chinese girl from Bristol.”
Shoenfelt’s narrator, “Phil,” is a lost man of unclear background, a calculating conniver whose weaknesses and vulnerabilities prod him toward boneheaded behavior that eventually turns wicked. Phil’s got few scruples against stealing or massaging the truth in the interest of obtaining his fix or getting a leg up in the dealer wars. Unlike Junkie Love’s other characters, however, Shoenfelt bequeaths Phil with a vague suggestion of possible redemption—something Shoenfelt often does with the characters of his songs.
Shoenfelt has stated that Junkie Love should not be regarded as a memoir but as a novel based on his nearly decade-long experience as a heroin/substance abuser in New York City and London in the 1980s. This era is now recognized as a time in which hard drug abuse by ordinary people in the West exploded to unprecedented levels.
Phil is stingy with information about his own background but is extravagant with info about Cissy. We learn she grew up in New York and Iran and was dispatched to a boarding school in Switzerland[6] after her father disappeared from the scene when she was 13. In Tehran, her Iranian grandfather sexually assaulted her, while “an older boy from the American school” introduced her to the pleasures of smoking opium. Her mother seems to have been helpless amidst all of it. Cissy had not become the “perfect little Persian princess that her mother had dreamed of,” but instead a young woman ready to enter the “dark and treacherous waters of big-time drug-dealing”—in search of wealth and status, “beholden to no-one.”
But as Phil explains: “Cissy was, behind the façade, the original, wide-eyed, little girl-lost alone in the big, bad world. She had no idea of the sinister forces she was playing with, and that were about to rain down upon her dreaming, innocent head.”
Just 18 and on her own in London, Cissy was hitting the party/club scene, making her own clothes and selling her own handmade jewelry from a stall in Portobello Market. What better time, then, for an ambitious (if troubled) young lass like Cissy to take up with Scottish Dougie, “a Glaswegian hard man of the old school, about thirty years of age”? Dougie, who’d already served time for offenses ranging from armed robbery to GBH, was built like the “proverbial brick shit-house,” had a three-inch knife scar on one side of his face and “a flattened, almost ape-like appearance” due to his nose having been broken multiple times.
“Things started to go wrong almost from the start,” Phil says—and it isn’t long before Cissy is sentenced to prison after getting corralled in a drug bust that may have been set in motion by her bragging to acquaintances about how well her drug-dealing career was going. Cissy would end up doing two years in the can. This “effectively pulled the plug on Cissy’s career as a social climber and bon vivant,” says Phil. Dougie would be sentenced to seven years.
But all the while, both are increasingly dizzy from the cravings. They’re losing ground to their joneses—to the Big H, the hibernating addiction monster purring within. Phil goes into a tizzy after he discovers, during their visit to the Reading Music Festival, that Cissy’s secretly been using again. How could she be so dumb and reckless? Deep down, however, “ex-addict” Phil—who, by the way, has been doing “more and more speed in order to keep awake” while driving his T-shirt truck around London—feels left out.
Phil tries to discourage Cissy but she is truculent—she tells Phil to butt out of what is clearly her own issue. From this point on, the bad decisions start flying at a side-splitting LOL—even ROFL—pace.
One of the strengths of Junkie Love is the window it offers into the mental processes of the addict. Out of his overwhelming desire to be with Cissy (or so he tells himself), Phil decides that, clearly, the best move would be for him to return to his old profession of drug dealer—and for both of them to move into a Camden Road squat occupied by other junkies.
Page 56: “But I was all fired up, and brushed Cissy’s reservations aside—there was no way I was going to get back into using again, of that I was sure.”
Page 61: “As if in a dream, I tied-off and got a vein up almost immediately, ‘Ol’ Faithful’ in the crook of my left arm, and as I stuck the needle in I almost shit myself in anticipation. The rush was incredible. I thought I was going to pass out, it was so intense, a spreading white light that warmed every cell and nerve-ending in my body, and that felt like the best one hundred orgasms I’d ever had, all rolled into one.”
Page 62: “I knew that I’d fucked up by getting high, but what was most worrying was that I had no real awareness of how it had actually happened. No conscious decision had been taken. I had moved as if under the control of some power alien to me, like a sleep-walker; and it suddenly seemed that this whole idea I’d concocted of weaning Cissy away from her habit was merely a pretext that my unconscious mind had formulated for getting back into close contact with heroin once again. I was aware of a hidden part of me that had its own agenda of secret appetites and desires, that moved of its own volition and took no account of ‘me’ at all. I could feel it inside, working away, moving silently along its own invisible tracks; and not only that, it was much stronger than me—of this, I was totally sure.”
Any semblance of “control” rapidly vanishes. One day, Cissy disappears with the “money and the methadone,” and it is weeks before Phil sees her again. During her time out of Phil’s sight, Cissy somehow has a reunion with Scottish Dougie. That’s right, Dougie is out of prison and back on the streets.
When Cissy tells Phil that “I can’t be together with you anymore, it’s just not gonna work out,” and that Dougie told her that he contracted HIV from sharing dirty needles, Phil loses whatever tenuous grip he had on civilized behavior. He has become a mad dog, practically begging to be taken out of his misery.
Shoenfelt pulverizes in a passage that left this reviewer stunned and breathless. The possible uses of literature—the whole farking point of it all—haven’t seemed the same since:
“Cissy looked at me in disbelief for a moment, then her face twisted in contempt. I saw the punch coming, but made no attempt to dodge it, and her tiny fist slammed into my mouth, actually drawing blood. All the uncertainty, pain and frustration of the previous few weeks welled up inside me, and without stopping to think, I punched her right back. . . .”
The break leads to Phil and Cissy running separate drug-dealing operations inside the Camden Town squat. Cissy sells “smack, cocaine and speed from her room downstairs,” “surrounded by six or seven pale-faced young guys. Junkie castratos in the court of Queen Cissy.”
Each day, as well, death seems to be moving closer. Cissy gets roughed up by some guys after an expensive deal goes wrong. They threaten to slash her throat. She survives but with two black eyes and her “prized hair-extensions” snipped off. Phil sells gear to Roy, who then proceeds to overdose in Phil’s room. Roy survives thanks to some quick thinking by Sid, who gives him mouth-to-mouth and CPR while Phil gives him a salt injection.
The finale sees Phil face-to-face with “Brian,” a visitor to the squat who has overdosed. Someone has tried to revive Brian by removing his clothes and giving him a cold bath, but Brian has complicated things by evacuating his bowels. The person who tried to help him has left. Phil discovers Brian unconscious in a bathtub full of frigid water and his own shit.
After helping to save Brian’s life (that flash of silver lining), Phil announces: “Me . . . I’m through with the junkie life. I can’t afford and can’t be bothered to wait around any longer. . . . I’m bailing out of the sinking ship. . . . . I just feel so heartily sick, tired and bored of the whole fucking deal that I might even succeed, this time, in staying off smack for good.”
Junkie Love must be regarded as the foundational prose text in the field of Shoenfelt studies. It is crucial to a deeper understanding of Shoenfelt’s experience and worldview—and key to a keener insight into the artistic persona behind powerful, essential albums like Backwoods Crucifixion, God Is the Other Face of the Devil, Blue Highway and Flowers for Alice.
See full review on Thor Garcia's goodreads.com blog.
View all my reviews
July 7, 2023
3.5*
May 21, 2015
Within a span of a month I met two people who had written books with the same title: this one is an autobiographical short novel by an Englishman that I met in Prague; the other is a memoir written by American living in San Francisco that I met in Minnesota all of which sounds like a tantalizing prospect for a dual review.
October 22, 2025
Dosť podceňovaná kniha o narkománii, dej je marginálny a hoci je to fikcia autor si s heroínom prežil asi dosť až do tej miery ,že sa z tejto tenkej novely stáva akási dlhá esej
January 10, 2025
I read this book in a couple days; the style is pretty linear and it is mainly narrative. I appreciated the detailed harsh descriptions of the subtle mechanisms of ero addiction as narrated by a person that struggled with it, with no romanticization of drug abuse, but also the sparse descriptions of the external reality, with people being slaves of the system for their whole lives. They were not particularly enlightening but there was some potential.
The plot is not compelling but this is not the aim of the author, I think, as he is concerned about creating the picture of 2 devastated characters, stuck in their self-destructive loops. Sometimes I had the impression that also the story was somehow stuck, and other times I felt like there was no need for some episodes or characters… I had the impression of being in front of some “fillers”.
The final is the one you would expect… I would have appreciated that more importance was given to the recounting of impressions and reflections, perhaps crossing a broader spectrum of themes or spanning wider. Sometimes even the reflections seem to stagnate and always focus on the same point without providing other interesting ideas.
Unfortunately in this panorama not even metaphorical or lexical choices seem to help, remaining on an average banal level…
The plot is not compelling but this is not the aim of the author, I think, as he is concerned about creating the picture of 2 devastated characters, stuck in their self-destructive loops. Sometimes I had the impression that also the story was somehow stuck, and other times I felt like there was no need for some episodes or characters… I had the impression of being in front of some “fillers”.
The final is the one you would expect… I would have appreciated that more importance was given to the recounting of impressions and reflections, perhaps crossing a broader spectrum of themes or spanning wider. Sometimes even the reflections seem to stagnate and always focus on the same point without providing other interesting ideas.
Unfortunately in this panorama not even metaphorical or lexical choices seem to help, remaining on an average banal level…
September 10, 2023
Backwoods Crucifixion
Phil Shoënfelt è musicista di culto. Autentico prime mover post punk con quei Khmer Rouge che potevano vantare tra le proprie fila anche Barry "Scratchy" Myers, dj aduso ad accompagnare i Clash in tour. Il bello viene dopo, quando Mark E. Smith (sempre sia lodato) lo scopre e lo annette alla sua etichetta Cog SInister. Bisognerà però attendere il 1990 e quel monolite intitolato 'Backwoods Crucifixion' (Paperhouse) per comprendere la penna e lo spartito di questo junkie. Disco di spettacolare bitume emotivo che indica(va) la via a Nick Cave e a tutti i suoi (spesso infausti) adepti. Un Nikki Sudden della Bowery fatto d'assenzio, un Leonard Cohen dickensiano negli intenti. Junkie Love si adagia in quello spartito, con calligrafie dalle vene indurite. Bellissimo.
Phil Shoënfelt è musicista di culto. Autentico prime mover post punk con quei Khmer Rouge che potevano vantare tra le proprie fila anche Barry "Scratchy" Myers, dj aduso ad accompagnare i Clash in tour. Il bello viene dopo, quando Mark E. Smith (sempre sia lodato) lo scopre e lo annette alla sua etichetta Cog SInister. Bisognerà però attendere il 1990 e quel monolite intitolato 'Backwoods Crucifixion' (Paperhouse) per comprendere la penna e lo spartito di questo junkie. Disco di spettacolare bitume emotivo che indica(va) la via a Nick Cave e a tutti i suoi (spesso infausti) adepti. Un Nikki Sudden della Bowery fatto d'assenzio, un Leonard Cohen dickensiano negli intenti. Junkie Love si adagia in quello spartito, con calligrafie dalle vene indurite. Bellissimo.
March 9, 2020
Deliciously disturbing read!
The rawness of the narrative had me feeling like I was right there living the disastrous lifestyle of the heroin addict.
Although the story was sad with hopelessness and chaos, I didn’t find it depressing, weirdly.
I loved the authors ideas on the structures in our society that we accept as sheep and our desire to live a ‘normal’ life....whatever that is
The rawness of the narrative had me feeling like I was right there living the disastrous lifestyle of the heroin addict.
Although the story was sad with hopelessness and chaos, I didn’t find it depressing, weirdly.
I loved the authors ideas on the structures in our society that we accept as sheep and our desire to live a ‘normal’ life....whatever that is
Read
January 18, 2024a decent read but adds little to the genre
May 4, 2024
Amateurish in the best way. A lot less depressing than the William S Burroughs equivalent bc shoenfelt actually kicked his habit :-)
August 11, 2025
3.5⭐️ if Trainspotting was condensed into a short story.
July 22, 2025
I liked how they didn’t make this into a romance novel and kept it real, but it’s so negative. He said you can be a sheep, wolf, or cockroach but we are unhappy in the end. I dont know, I choose to live life a little different. Focus on its simple pleasures. Why does everything have to be so life or death?
February 24, 2015
My second reading of Junkie Love, and I enjoyed it just as much the second time around.
A very dark and bleak account of hopeless love and heroin addiction, set in London.
Very bleak and depressing, an obvious downward spiral that you just can't look away from.
The raw narrative style is one I enjoy, especially in a novel of addiction..
Though the whole book is very gloomy, it is still an engrossing read that completely sucks you in, until you are living the hopeless life of this committed addict.
Junkie Love is a window into the thought processes and reasoning of the heroin addict.
Illustrating the compulsive pull of heroin and how the addict keeps going back for more, even long after it becomes clear that things can't end well.
A worthy addition to the ' junkie memoir' genre.
A very dark and bleak account of hopeless love and heroin addiction, set in London.
Very bleak and depressing, an obvious downward spiral that you just can't look away from.
The raw narrative style is one I enjoy, especially in a novel of addiction..
Though the whole book is very gloomy, it is still an engrossing read that completely sucks you in, until you are living the hopeless life of this committed addict.
Junkie Love is a window into the thought processes and reasoning of the heroin addict.
Illustrating the compulsive pull of heroin and how the addict keeps going back for more, even long after it becomes clear that things can't end well.
A worthy addition to the ' junkie memoir' genre.
February 23, 2013
It's not that this book is dislikeable or badly written, but more that the subject, the characters, their existence and their journey is brutal. Just difficult to fathom when it is a Universe you cannot inhabit and in truth you do not want too.
The ending is nihilistic and confronting in that you, the reader is being challenged or even mocked for being "part of the grind". There's an elitism, a cynicism and a coldness that is disturbing.
You *really* want to like Phil - he seems harmless or nice enough, but isn't that the point - he's not?
Cissy is so vivid, so rich, so loud and is the story - it would've been interesting to have more elements of her from anothe rpoint of view or have "her voice" come through rather than being filtered through the bitter eyes of Phil.
The ending is nihilistic and confronting in that you, the reader is being challenged or even mocked for being "part of the grind". There's an elitism, a cynicism and a coldness that is disturbing.
You *really* want to like Phil - he seems harmless or nice enough, but isn't that the point - he's not?
Cissy is so vivid, so rich, so loud and is the story - it would've been interesting to have more elements of her from anothe rpoint of view or have "her voice" come through rather than being filtered through the bitter eyes of Phil.
August 17, 2017
quando il titolo dice tutto: "junkie love" è una cruda, dura e suppongo assai sincera storia d'amore tra due tossicomani, phil e cissy. la storia è dannatamente verosimile, sin nei particolari più atroci (stiano lontani i più sensibili), ed è difficile che phil non sia simpatico sin da subito. però non è burroughs, e neppure jim carroll, e neanche "trainspotting". poteva essere meglio, e sarebbe stato una bomba: perchè a volte essere "sinceri" non basta...
September 17, 2011
Bleak tale of heroin addiction in Prague.
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