After exhausting their resources in the slums of Los Angeles, a junkie and his wife settle in London’s ‘murder mile,’ the city’s most violent and criminally corrupt section. Persevering past failed treatments, persistent temptation, urban ennui, and his wife’s ruinous death wish, the nameless narrator fights to reclaim his life.
In prose that could peel paint from a car, Tony O’Neill re-creates the painfully comic, often tragic days of a recovering heroin addict.
Neither entirely confessional nor encompassed by what it recounts, it follows an uneasy and unsettling pattern in recounting a series of emotionally wrenching events… It makes for one of the most horrific descriptions of a relationship I’ve read in a long time, in which barely repressed hatred sidles up alongside addiction, paranoia, neglect, and occasional spurts of blood via a misplaced syringe. … For a novel so focused on the abandonment of control, Down and Out on Murder Mile derives much of its power from the subtlety, even precision, of its structure.
— Tobias Carroll (Full Review)
A triumph of the junkie form… O’Neill’s most accomplished novel to date.
— Andrew Gallix (Full Review)
A compulsively readable, fast-paced portrait of a young would-be rocker junkie… consistent tone of urgency and desperation creates a gritty world of its own that compels despite its flaws.
— Publishers Weekly (Full Review)
The whole truth with no reservations: not a pretty story, but a rare telling… illuminating the filthy squalor of council slums and the florescent detritus of a broken system.
— Kirkus Reviews (Full Review)
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