![]() ![]() At a local gin mill (``Out on Bail'') with his fellow losers, he ponders arbitrary fate among those who fancy themselves ``tragic'' and ``helpless.'' After shooting heroin with his girlfriend at a Holiday Inn, he finds his ``mother'' in an angelic barmaid (``Work''). His highs can be sharp, edgy, and intense, resulting in casual violence and emotional disconnectedness (``Dundun'') or sluggish, as he threatens to nod out before our eyes. Gobbling whatever drugs he can, the nameless narrator witnesses a fatal car wreck while hitchhiking and experiences a strange euphoria. But this eventually recovering slacker reveals in these deceptively thin tales a psyche so tormented and complex that we allow him his bleak redemption. Johnson (Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, 1991 Fiskadoro, 1985 etc.) brings together eleven down-and-out stories linked by their disagreeable narrator-a lowlife of mythic proportions who abuses drugs, booze, and people with reckless indifference. ![]()
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