Peter Stenson - A book that manages to break your heart, make you dizzy, and punch you in the gut all at once. You will be hard-pressed to find a novel as dark or intense in any bookstore

Peter Stenson, Thirty-Seven: A Novel, Dzanc Books, 2019.


The Survivors, their members known only by the order in which they joined, live alone in a rural Colorado mansion. They believe that sickness bears honesty, and that honesty bears change. Fueled by the ritualized Cytoxan treatments that leave them on the verge of death, they instigate the Day of Gifts, a day that spells shocking violence and the group’s demise.
Enter Mason Hues, formerly known as Thirty-Seven, the group’s final member and the only one both alive and free. Eighteen years old and living in a spartan apartment after his release from a year of intensive mental health counseling, he takes a job at a thrift shop and expects to while away his days as quietly and unobtrusively as possible.
But when his enigmatic boss Talley learns his secret, she comes to believe that there is still hope in the Survivor philosophy. She pushes Mason to start the group over again―this time with himself as One.
Part Fight Club, part The Girls, and entirely unlike anything you’ve ever experienced, Peter Stenson’s Thirty-Seven is an audacious and austere novel that explores our need to belong. Our need to be loved. Our need to believe in something greater than ourselves, and ultimately our capacity for self-delusion.


The lone survivor of a cult tries to readjust to life as an average citizen, but when he meets a girl whose quest for honesty and happiness reminds him of his younger self, his future begins to look like his past.
Mason Hues’ life has been one horrible situation after the next. His adopted father’s predatory behavior propelled Mason to run away from home to join The Survivors, a cult whose members inject the drug Cytoxin—commonly used in chemotherapy treatments—which sickens them to the point of immobility. The closer the cult members get to death, they say, the more they gain a new appreciation for life, an appreciation which evolves into a longing to spread their “teachings” to others and culminates in a mass murder-suicide called the Day of Gifts. After surviving the Day of Gifts, Mason spends time in a juvenile penitentiary and a psychiatric ward, then rejoins society and meets Talley, with whom he forms a relationship that soon begins to follow the same downward spiral as Mason’s life with The Survivors. With his second novel, Stenson (Fiend, 2013) proves to be a more articulate, more empathic, and more intelligent version of Chuck Palahniuk. Stenson’s sentences devastate, and his characters are nuanced and warm, which makes the terrible things that happen to them and the terrible choices they make more painful to read about. Stenson’s cutting descriptions of drug use, violence, and nihilistic despair suffocate the reader like a noose. Here's his description of "the American Dream," for example: “Every conversation is one-sided, a mirror reflecting looks and status and wealth. Every person is steeped in want…filling themselves with goods and sex and alcohol and validation so they forget about the fact that they all will die.” Themes of immortality, sacrifice, self-hatred, and the artificiality of modern life feel new in Stenson’s world, a world teeming with prophetic visions, existential provocations, and ideological assertions that will leave readers questioning the way they lead their lives.
A book that manages to break your heart, make you dizzy, and punch you in the gut all at once. You will be hard-pressed to find a novel as dark or intense in any bookstore.—Kirkus Reviews (starred)

Stenson (Fiend) delivers an eerie, complex, and unsettling portrayal of a traumatized teen caught between the brainwashing tenets of a self-destructive cult and the more common indoctrination into mainstream society’s expectations. Just released from a three-year stint in a Colorado mental health facility, 18-year-old Mason Hues narrates his life in present tense. As he puts his life back together, he works at a thrift shop and falls for owner Talley. He tells her that at 15, he ran away from a home where his father masturbated in his bedroom doorway. Mason fell in with the Survivors, a cult led by charismatic Dr. James Shepard, whose Munchausen-like belief that “sickness bears honesty, honesty bears change” prompts cult members to willingly inject themselves with chemotherapy drug Cytoxan so as to spark unconditional love for those worse off than themselves. Mason was the 37th (and final) member, but he left the group just before their perpetration of a string of violent acts that became known as the Day of Gifts. Talley, emotionally fragile herself, convinces Mason to revive the cult. Stenson infuses Mason’s chilling matter-of-fact recitation of Survivor platitudes with insight into a young man’s psychological descent. This novel is a provocative, thoroughly gripping ride. - Publishers Weekly (starred)


The surviving member of an infamous cult finds himself drawn back into the life in the uneasy but engaging Thirty-Seven by Peter Stenson.
A cult known as the Survivors shocked the nation after the Day of Gifts, a single day on which several members enacted horrific murders and other acts of violence. Fast forward a year, and only one member remains alive and out of prison.
Mason Hues was the youngest member of the Survivors and hopes to live out the rest of his days in relative anonymity. Hoping to escape punishment, he makes use of several aliases—Jon Doe, Thirty-Seven, and, eventually, One. Upon wandering into a thrift shop, his plans for obscurity go awry. Mason befriends the manic Talley and both set out to reform the cult, though their choices may ultimately only lead others down dark paths.
Mason Hues is an unreliable narrator, which gives Thirty-Seven a compelling edge. Despite espousing a desire to be honest, Mason is clearly withholding information from Talley, his therapist, and even his audience. Further muddying the waters, he studies the cult founder’s book religiously.
The narrative comes strictly through his perspective. Dialogue is incredible. Through lengthy footnotes, Mason speaks directly to the audience. Paradoxically, his footnotes seem the most honest portions of his story but also contradict his overall narrative.
Writing is extremely engaging, with clever uses of rhythm, repetition, and other musicality that give portions of the story a songlike feel. This melodic aspect functions incredibly well when paired with some of the more gruesome aspects of the story. Violent acts, disturbing allegations, and painful dialogue feel less brutal in this tone, but it doesn’t detract from the uneasy atmosphere.
Thirty-Seven is uncomfortable, disturbing, and impossible to put down. Focusing on innate human desires to belong, it explores survival, escape, and darkly repeating patterns. - John M. Murray  
https://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/silver-girl/
    

Only a year after receiving his MFA from Colorado State University, Stenson published an offbeat first novel, Fiend (2013), about a group of methamphetamine users thriving during a zombie apocalypse, which rapidly developed a sizable counterculture following. His latest work sparkles with just as much edgy creativity as it tells the story of Mason Hues, aka “Thirty-Seven,” the only remaining member of the Survivors, a suicidal cult run by a former oncologist euphemistically dubbed by the media as Dr. Sick. At 15, after fleeing a sexually abusive father, Mason lands on the doorstep of a remote Colorado mansion harboring 36 devotees of a man known as One, who believes that keeping people in a state of chronic, chemotherapy-induced illness fosters greater honesty and deeper connections. In an unnerving but spellbinding story line that alternates between Mason’s days among his twisted adopted family and his later post-traumatic struggles following the cult’s self-destruction, Stenson shines a spotlight on the darker side of humankind’s primal yearning for family. His brilliantly vivid prose and striking characters deserve the widest possible audience.— Carl Hays
 https://www.booklistonline.com/Thirty-Seven-Peter-Stenson/pid=9214363?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1


“It is such a gift when you read something that really sings, that is so unique and vivid that you can’t put it down but you want to savor every second....This is not a traditional horror novel, but Stenson is not a traditional writer. He does his own thing and he innovates in a way that is not only new, but courageous—and he is not afraid to get dark....I want to put this one in everyone’s hands—start a little Survivors cult of my own.."—Shelf Stalker




Whether it’s sociological interest or morbid curiosity, we are fascinated with cults. From Heaven’s Gate and Scientology to NXIVM, we alternately view their members as monsters, martyrs, or victims. Mason Hue, the narrator of Peter Stenson’s Thirty-Seven, is all three.






When we meet Mason he is still a teenager, but of legal age, freshly discharged from a mental institution where he lived after being part of a cult known as the Survivors. The Survivors, who ritually poisoned themselves with chemotherapy drugs to achieve a state of pure honesty, earned notoriety after going on a killing spree and committing mass suicide.
But what happens to Mason, who was 15 at the time, when you survive the Survivors?
Now living in Denver, he has a boss and sometimes-girlfriend Talley, and when she learns his secret she becomes fascinated with the movement’s beliefs. And before long, she’s as entangled in Mason’s narrative as we are.
Thirty-Seven is the early front-runner for best transgressive novel of the year, not only for the story itself (a gritty mind-fuck confessional) but for Stenson’s handling of the narrative. There are many great passages in Thirty-Seven, but perhaps none as stealthy as this one: “The stairs don’t squeak because I know where to step.”
It’s a simple line, yes, one that you breeze over at first, but at this point in the story Mason (the eponymous Thirty-Seven), is sneaking into his childhood home. In a book filled with violence and philosophy and sex and recreational cancer treatment, why does this seemingly innocuous line stand out?
Because unreliable narrators are fun to read, but difficult to write convincingly. This is the world according to Mason Hues, and time and again, he proves to be untrustworthy, confused, and more than a little dishonest (evasive, at best). At various times he is a huckster, a victim, possibly a psychopathic mastermind.
We don’t know what to make of Mason a lot of the time, but subtle touches like “The stairs don’t squeak because I know where to step” make him relatable. I’ve never joined a death cult, but, like most teenagers, I learned which steps to avoid when sneaking home late at night.
These are the dark insights that make transgressive fiction so powerful. Pure villains and monsters often lack depth. Anti-heroes can become too cool and charming. But when truly sick and disturbed characters reveal themselves to be all too logical, shit gets uncomfortable.
For me, the gold standard example of this type of line is from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, “At first I wondered why the room felt so safe. Then I realized it was because there were no windows.”
It’s a moment of familiar comfort followed by a horrific gut-punch. The muscle-memory of footsteps on the stairs reminds us that Mason isn’t well, but he’s not a madman. He’s a logical thinker, as are the others in Thirty-Seven. And that’s what makes this novel so delightfully unsettling.
Full disclosure, Stenson and I were in the same MFA program, but this is a merit-based review (it’s his second novel, and his debut, Fiend, has been translated and published internationally). Many of the elements in this book appeared in his work in the program, and his talent was ever-present. It’s great to see them come together and generate well-earned success.
For fans of transgressive fiction, put this on your summer reading list. - Vince Darcangelo
https://ensuingchapters.com/2018/04/23/peter-stenson-thirty-seven/


How do you recommend an experience you never want to have again? How does a film critic say, for instance, that Requiem for a Dream is a must-watch, when it’s infused with such ugliness and despair? When a piece of art is unapologetically dark and unpleasant but of objectively excellent quality, finding a way to push audiences toward it is a challenge.In this vein is Thirty-Seven, by American novelist Peter Stenson, an intense, exceptionally well-made, unforgettable book. I loved every word, but I can’t suggest it’s an enjoyable read. It’s a horror story without ghosts or beasts, a book that continually evokes Rorschach, in Watchmen, saying “as dark as it gets.” Meticulously constructed, Hitchcockian in its layering of tension, Faulknerian in its network of ideas, wise and strange as an angel, black as a night in a dungeon. Certainly one of the best books I read in 2018. But difficult to recommend. At least, not if you’re looking for a comfortable ride.
The narrator of Thirty-Seven is Mason Hues, a young man with an abnormal adolescence. At fifteen, he gets tangled up with a small cult, which has grown out of a support group for people who have lost a loved one to cancer. The cult believes that the way to enlightenment involves extreme suffering, being cared for in the midst of suffering, and caring for others as they suffer. Healthy people themselves, they take self-regulated doses of the cancer chemotherapy drug Cytoxan, which sickens them deliberately. Other elements of their belief system generally revolve around suffering and detachment, but in a much more direct and toxic way than in Buddhism. The leader of the cult is named One, the second member to join is Two, and so forth until our narrator, Thirty-Seven.
The cult predictably progresses toward illegal action and murder, and then dissolves after a Helter Skelter-like crisis, leaving Thirty-Seven and One as the only surviving members. One goes to prison. Thirty-Seven is given a new identity in exchange for federal testimony and sent out to live in the world. This is where the novel begins: with Thirty-Seven trying to adapt to adult life outside his bizarre, but nurturing, family of choice. He gets a job at a thrift store and falls into a symbiotic friendship with Talley, the young woman who owns it. He and Talley re-form the cult themselves, as One and Two. Their alliance declines into obsession and insanity, and they become both victims and perpetrators of horrifying street crime. The novel’s conclusion, and a final scene at the prison where One is held, throw everything we’ve read thus far into doubt.
This may sound tawdry, as if it’s blending marketable true-crime elements with vulnerable characters in order to titillate a jaded reading audience. But the actions of the book rest on a dense bed of philosophy and beliefs about the purpose of human life. Thirty-Seven’s narration feels like it comes from a perspective of actual enlightenment, as if he can really understand what goes on in any human mind at any time. His insights include: “The only reason a person listens to another person’s story is to see how it relates to him, or at the most to see how he would’ve reacted under the same circumstances.” “This is what the American dream has always looked like…Every person is steeped in want, and this is applauded. It’s aptitude. It’s go-get-‘er-ness. It’s hunger.” “Humans are all fundamentally the same. We are a desk of control switches in a recording studio. Our only differences are the volume levels and mixing effects. Our desires are the beating drums. Our choruses are the unshakable beliefs of our selves.”
Ultimately, Thirty-Seven’s perspective is cynical and grieving but not misanthropic. He believes that people have lost the ability to discern what’s important. He misses the vulnerability brought on by One’s methods of living authentically. His attempts to replicate the acceptance and certainty he felt in the cult are extreme, and unhealthy, but they come from the certainty that there is a better way to live than thoughtless consumption and medicated sleep.
The book possesses an intricate infrastructure, a constellation of powerful ideas repeated and recombined over and over: fathers, human touch, honesty, illness and death, father-death, death while being touched, honesty through illness, fulfilment through illness, fulfilment through fathers, so on. Stenson further embroiders the narrative’s details every time these ideas repeat. The pace of the book is magisterial, rotating slowly between past and present; a few relatively small time periods are explored to fathoms of depth.
The novel’s idea-infrastructure is upsettingly convincing. It is easy to accept Thirty-Seven’s enlightenment, and to be upset at the doctors trying to coax him back into normal American life. I don’t endorse healthy human beings voluntarily taking chemotherapy to somehow be closer to truth; that’s entirely crazy. But, as they say, there are no atheists in foxholes. Finding truth close to death is an old, old idea.
In any event, a book that ties the reader up in such moral knots is a book worth reading, no matter how displeasing the reading experience may be. And it is. The characters’ illnesses are well-described, their depravities carefully delineated, their crimes docketed without fail. Enlightenment through suffering necessarily entails suffering, and this book bears a lot of it. Plus, the ideas in it are so heavy, and so imbricated, that reading the book is an intense, blinkered experience. Even if you’ve put the book down, your emotions haven’t really let go, and your mind keeps working at its contradictions.
Since a book like Thirty-Seven requires so much investment from the reader, its author damn well better know what he’s doing. Stenson does; his craft is as finely honed as a sushi knife. He is capable of registers ranging from Talley’s like-whatever delivery to a psychiatrist’s dry patience. The dialogue is sharp and rapid-fire, the kind that’s realistic without being burdened by idiom:

She says, “Are you a good worker?”
“I’ve never had a job.”
“Jesus, you aren’t making this easy.”
“I imagine I’m a good worker.”
“I can give you like two shifts a week, tops twelve hours. No benefits. Shitty pay. But you’ll get to play with clothes.”
She winks. I smile.

The twist at the story’s peak is unpredictable, but not absurd, and it makes the novel into a puzzle-box without making it gimmicky. Stenson has written a small, dark miracle of a book.
 Dark being the operative word, however. Such a book is not for every reader, no matter how stellar it is. I don’t even know where to start with trigger warnings for Thirty-Seven; just about any upsetting thing you can imagine happens. Nevertheless, it’s incisive, absorbing, persuasive, and impossible to forget. Just be sure to have some cute dog videos lined up when you’re through reading for the day.


- Katharine Coldiron
www.3ammagazine.com/3am/a-small-dark-miracle-of-a-book-peter-stensons-thirty-seven/



Peter Stenson, Fiend: A Novel, Random House, 2013.
excerpt


There's more than one kind of monster.
When Chase Daniels first sees the little girl in umbrella socks tearing open the Rottweiler, he's not too concerned. As a longtime meth addict, he's no stranger to horrifying, drug-fueled hallucinations.
But as he and his fellow junkies soon discover, the little girl is no illusion. The end of the world really has arrived.
The funny thing is, Chase's life was over long before the apocalypse got here, his existence already reduced to a stinking basement apartment and a filthy mattress and an endless grind of buying and selling and using. He's lied and cheated and stolen and broken his parents' hearts a thousand times. And he threw away his only shot at sobriety a long time ago, when he chose the embrace of the drug over the woman he still loves.
And if your life's already shattered beyond any normal hopes of redemption... well, maybe the end of the world is an opportunity. Maybe it's a last chance for Chase to hit restart and become the man he once dreamed of being. Soon he's fighting to reconnect with his lost love and dreaming of becoming her hero among civilization's ruins.
But is salvation just another pipe dream?
Propelled by a blistering first-person voice and featuring a powerfully compelling antihero, Fiend is at once a riveting portrait of addiction, a pitch-black love story, and a meditation on hope, redemption, and delusion - not to mention one hell of a zombie novel.

“Shockingly personal…Shaun of the Dead meets Trainspotting.” ―MTV.com

“Shambling, scabrous figures rotting from the inside out and driven by an insatiable hunger―there are more than a few similarities between meth heads and zombies. Stenson exploits all of them in Fiend.” ―Entertainment Weekly

“[Stands] apart from the pack of zombie lit…Stenson has a sharp ear for language and a gift for dark humor.” ―Denver Post

“Best read of the year. Best zombie book, ever. Masterful illustration about how painful and overwhelming addiction can be…I want every book I read to enthrall me as consistently and emotionally as Fiend did.” ―SF Signal

“Certain to invite comparisons to Hubert Selby and Cormac McCarthy…one scalding pressure cooker of a novel, and I advise you to buckle up and hold on tight because you’re in for one hell of a ride.” ―Donald Ray Pollock

“This is the real meat. The last zombie novel you’ll ever need.” ―Warren Ellis

“Peter Stenson has done the near impossible in delivering a savage firestorm of a page-turner while also enabling a hard and earnest look at addiction and love. I tore through Fiend with the crazed fervor of an addict, but like all great stories these characters lingered in my thoughts long after I turned the last beautiful and brutal page.” ―Alan Heathcock

“Peter Stenson is the bastard child of Cormac McCarthy and George Romero. In Fiend, he takes the reader on a dark joyride replete with junkies, zombies, and buckets of gore. Here is a novel that will jack your pulse and break your heart all at once.” ―Steve Almond

"Unnerving but spellbinding...Stenson's brilliantly vivid prose and striking characters deserve the widest possible audience." - Booklist (starred review)

"Uneasy but engaging...Writing is extremely engaging, with clever uses of rhythm, repetition, and other musicality that give portions of the story a songlike feel. ... Thirty-Seven is uncomfortable, disturbing, and impossible to put down." - Foreword Reviews

Tweakers versus zombies. That’s about it, really.
Stenson’s narrator is Chase Daniels, a white-bread methamphetamine addict with a habit of describing his physical symptoms in excruciating detail. Our guy has been holed up for weeks with his best friend, Typewriter, getting “spun” on those glorious little shards of glass. When Chase rubs his eyes, looks out the window and sees a little girl devouring the carcass of a dog, he thinks it’s just a vivid hallucination. It turns out that he and Typewriter managed to bypass a zombie apocalypse that plays out just like the ones you’ve seen on TV, with the creepy exception that the virus makes all its victims giggle. The apocalypse is enough to make Chase think that his ex-girlfriend, KK, was right when she skipped off to rehab. When Chase finally reunites with his lady love, though, he’s saddled with her new boyfriend, and they’re both high as Wu-Tang. The gang eventually figures out that smoking or shooting is the only way to avoid becoming a giggler, theoretically giving them free range to keep getting high. But scoring scante and avoiding their brethren addicts isn’t easy even in a world without cops. Stenson's percussive style and grotesque imagery lend themselves well to the story.
A crisply written, grisly mashup tailor-made for black comedy junkies. - Kirkus

You could easily be forgiven for passing on Fiend as soon as I tell you that, yes, it’s a zombie novel. And yet, Fiend is the reason we never write off genres: because there’s always a chance that someone can do something wonderful, new, and fresh with it. Because while Peter Stenson has, nominally, given us a zombie novel, Fiend is also a novel about drug addicts – specifically, it’s a novel about meth addiction, with all the bluntness, black comedy, and unapologetically awful behavior of something like Trainspotting, married with the nightmarish reality of a world in which anything even close to “normal” society is gone.
Indeed, it takes a little bit to realize that Fiend isn’t just a drug novel in which our characters are hallucinating the horrors as a result of their meth habits. But very quickly, it becomes obvious that Fiend is a marriage of books: it’s a bleak, unrelenting portrait of addiction and what it does to people and their relationships; it’s a twisted, broken love story between two irrevocably damaged human beings; and it’s a post-apocalyptic zombie story, full of zombies that emit mad chuckles instead of groans. And if you’re wondering exactly how Stenson ties all of these things together, it won’t take long to realize that Stenson is using the zombie apocalypse as a metaphor for the devastation of addiction, which turns you away from other human beings and into a self-destructive spiral in which all you care about is the next big score.
And make no mistake here: Fiend pulls no punches in its recounting of the methhead lifestyle. Stenson is a recovering addict himself, and every page of Fiend feels like the voice of experience is pushing through, depicting addiction with honesty, a certain black humor and self-reflection, and a refusal to pretty up any of the details. The result is a book with absolutely abhorrent characters, ones with whom it’s almost impossible to empathize, even as we recognize the poor choices that led them down this path. Again, it’s hard not to make comparisons to Trainspotting, which does so much of what Fiend does – depicts both the appeal and the bleak reality of addiction, all without judgment being passed except by the characters themselves…except that Stenson plunges these characters into a world where their drug habits might just be the only thing worth living for anymore, and where the pockmarked skin and rotting teeth of the addicts pale in comparison to the cackling dead outside in the dark.
In other words, Fiend is two books in one, and lets them play off of each other beautifully, letting the horrors be underlined by the selfishness (and self-destructiveness) of the characters, just as the realities of addiction are played out on operatic scale in the background as the world crumbles. And best of all, Fiend finds a grounding, investing us in our main character’s last grasp at a healthy relationship in the midst of all of this – and giving us one thing to actually hope for in the midst of all of the awfulness.
Let’s be blunt: Fiend is full of unsympathetic characters, lots of profanity, graphic violence, explicit drug use, and unblinking looks at how far people will go for drugs. It’s scary, violent, brutal, nasty, and incredibly bleak. It’s also darkly funny, incredibly thoughtful, reflective, unapologetic, and beautifully literate in a counter-culture sort of way. It’s a book that is undeniably not for everyone. But if you’re open to what it offers, it’s a fascinating read, one that tells an honest story about addiction by fictionalizing it, and one that finds a new window on a classic horror by turning it into something even scarier. I absolutely loved it; it’s not like anything else, and that’s undeniably a good thing. - Josh Mauthe amazon.reviews

First, the opening sample was so wildly Gonzo, that I simply HAD to read it aloud to my spousal unit as said spousal unit tried to turn out the bedside lamp. I purchased it immediately and read through till her alarm rang as I finished, stunned, not really knowing how to describe how this book left me feeling, but it has hit me upon many levels with by far the greatest emotional and intellectual impact of any of hundreds of titles that I have read in years.
If forced to describe the work, I might observe that it begins with nods to "Train-Spotting", and Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas", then segues into something darker still, with strong notes of "Drugstore Cowboys" by way of "Night of the Living Dead, and perhaps even "The Poseidon Adventure" or a cerebral "World War Z". But that's just the hook to draw you into exploring the most extreme possible moments and environments of individuals and small group interactions trying to survive day by day to feed their chemical dependencies and the impossible situations they find themselves embroiled in during the process, and the moral challenges they place before themselves, ultimately sacrificing their own principles, relationships, bodies, and self-esteem/ souls in service to just trying to survive to the next hit while trying to find a line to the next day's worth as well.
On another level, the work delves beyond adventure novel to allow the reader to explore an extremely intimate experience of the life of an addict too resourceful and strong to surrender to the disease, too weak to be able to win free of it, finding oneself trapped in between those strengths and failings, ironically, or tragically, mutilating oneself in body and psyche beyond imagining, being unable or unwilling choose to stop or to be stopped by increasingly desperate circumstances.
The novel perhaps succeeds best at a third level as a morality play and metaphor for observing the extreme decisions one must force upon themselves to feed an overwhelming addiction. It helped me to understand my own brother's struggles and how they drove him sometimes to abandon all that he thought himself to be to feed his addiction, and the self-loathing it fed, and the confidence issues that he struggled with for the rest of his life, even after he managed ultimately to become clean.
But, while the beginning is hilarious, along the way, it becomes powerfully- tragic and moving. I still highly recommend buying and reading this book, but it's quite an adult and dark ride. I couldn't put it aside and read it through in an all-nighter session. - Grossly Irrelevant amazon.reviews