Adult Contemporary Review: Find Out How Sick Life Can Really Be On "Happy Mutant Baby Pills"

Happy Mutant Baby PillsTitle:  Happy Mutant Baby Pills
Author:  Jerry Stahl
Format:  ERC
Length:  304 pages
Expected Date of Publication:  October 22, 2013
Publisher:  Harper Perennial
ISBN:
0061990507 (ISBN13: 9780061990502)
Rating:  5 stars
 

 From the acclaimed and controversial author of Permanent Midnight comes a savagely satiric novel about taking revenge on those who poison the world in order to sell the cure

Lloyd has a particular set of skills. He writes the small print for presciption drugs, marital aids, and incontinence products. The clients present him with a list of possible side effects, and his job is "to recite and minimize-sometimes by just saying them really fast-other times by finding the language that can render them acceptable." The results are ingenious. The methods diabolical.

Lloyd has a habit, too. He cops smack during coffee breaks at his new job writing copy for Christian Swingles, an online dating service for the faithful. He finds a precarious balance between hackwork and heroin until he encounters Nora, a mysterious and troubled young woman, a Sylvia Plath with tattoos and implants, who asks for his help.

Lloyd falls swiftly in love, but Nora bestows her affections at a cost. Before Lloyd clears his head from the fog of romance, he finds himself complicit in Nora's grand scheme to horrify the world, to exact revenge on those who poison the populace in order to sell them the cure.

Stahl's gleefully twisted, maniacally brilliant prose, will delight, appall, and prove, once again, that Stahl is "a better-than-Burroughs virtuoso" (New Yorker).  -Goodreads



My Thoughts
This can best best described as a very eye opening read.  If that is, you want to open your eyes to find that you have stumbled into the extremely interesting and chemically convoluted lives of a heroine addicted Lloyd, and his equally addicted, exponentially more self destructive, and just plain "nutcase" of a girlfriend, Nora.  

What this book is:
1.  An honest exploration of chemically induced insanity allowed to roam free.
2.  Proof that codependency is a bad thing.
3.  Examples of two very smart people doing very stupid things while using said intelligence to justify said insanity.
4.  A socially relevant, beautifully written, darkly comical look at one couple's greatest fears and the monsters that helped create them.

What this book is not:
1.  Run of the mill fiction.
2.  Mindless
3.  For everyone.

If you like your reads a little dark, a little disturbing, a little poignant, and a whole lot WTF?
Read this book.

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