Sick City: A Novel
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Review
"You may feel disturbed by this very realistic account of addicts on a mission."--CurledUp.com
Product Description
Jeffrey has nowhere to go when Bill, his sugar-daddy boyfriend, croaks. But before he sets off into the bright glare of LA, he's sure to grab a few parting mementos: cash, a gun, some drugs, and one ancient, metal film canister that contains a treasure greater than all the rest combined: a tape taken from the scene of the Sharon Tate murders that supposedly features a drug-fuelled orgy. Jeffrey stashes the goods and promises himself to get clean before selling the merchandise. Randal is the fallen scion of a great Hollywood family. His habit and his rehab bills have long been overlooked by his indulgent father, but with him now dead and gone, he's left to the zealous sanctimony of his younger brother, who has enrolled him in Clean and Serene, a celebrity treatment center run by Dr. Mike, America's TV doctor. It is there that Randal meets Jeffrey. A plan is hatched by the new friends to unload the sex tape, but things do not go even remotely as planned. In the end, lives are lost, habits resumed, and careers squashed. It even snows in Las Vegas in this fast-paced, tightly plotted junkie page-turner from Tony O'Neill.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Paperback
Tony O'Neill is an amazing writer. His stories are gripping and wonderful and I always end up staying up late to read them and never want to put them down once I start. If you know and love Tony's other works (Digging The Vein and Down and Out on Murder Mile to name a couple) then you will be rewarded with even more great characters and a fantastic plot that just gets better and better.
I wouldn't be surprised if this book were made into a movie, it has you routing for the 'good' (but pretty messed up) guys from the start and clever twists and turns keep the story snowballing into an inevitable thrill ride that Tony is a master at creating.
I love this book and am still buzzing from the ride!
I wouldn't be surprised if this book were made into a movie, it has you routing for the 'good' (but pretty messed up) guys from the start and clever twists and turns keep the story snowballing into an inevitable thrill ride that Tony is a master at creating.
I love this book and am still buzzing from the ride!
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
13 reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
An unblinking and stark look into the lives of drug addicts and dealers
24 Sep 2010
Format:Paperback
SICK CITY is set in Los Angeles, though the events described here could take place in virtually any city or country where the illicit drug trade has taken hold. But L.A. is arguably the perfect tableau for it, given that location's reputation as a place where dreams come true or are shattered, and everything and everyone is for sale.
Tony O'Neill's novel is about drugs and the people who take them and are addicted to them. Pure and simple with no apologies. O'Neill knows of what he speaks and writes authoritatively on the subject. What SICK CITY does is takes the grit and grime of, say, NAKED LUNCH by William Burroughs and makes it coherent --- no cut-up technique here --- within the context of a caper novel, as imagined by Elmore Leonard. To put it another way, it consists of the parts of the movie Pulp Fiction that couldn't be filmed. The camera lens would have burned out.
SICK CITY neither explicitly condemns nor implicitly glorifies drug addiction. It simply provides an unblinking and stark look at the lives of a number of people, including a down-and-out exotic dancer, a homosexual prostitute in denial, a host of addicts and drug dealers, and a drug rehabilitation guru who is nursing his own nasty little secret. Points of view change frequently, and you might want to take this book in one long sitting in order to appreciate just how fascinating it is to watch everyone's lives intersect with each other. When the dust settles and the smoke clears, however, the book is about Jeffrey and Randall, two irredeemable junkies who acquire --- along with cash and some extremely strong controlled substances --- a sex tape involving Sharon Tate and a number of deceased celebrities. They want to sell it for a fortune --- gainful employment is not high on the "to do" list of either gentleman --- but along the way they attract the attention and ire of Pat, an extremely dangerous and unbalanced drug dealer who is out for revenge.
Most of SICK CITY occurs where the buses don't run, and even if they did, those who are in their right minds would never want to go there. And if you wandered into those areas by accident, you would call OnStar to come send a helicopter to get you the heck out. Even if you have not led a sheltered life, there are scenes here that you have never encountered before and probably never will see again: acts of physical and sexual violence --- some voluntary, some not so much --- that you would be hard-pressed to make up on your own. O'Neill's writing is shot through with such straight-ahead prose that the book reads more like a documentary, in the best sense, than a work of fiction.
And, while I have the feeling that this was not his intent, it is possibly one of the most anti-drug treatises I have ever read. The subject matter is such that you wouldn't read it to your 12-year-old, yet if you wanted to warn them away from that first hit of speed, SICK CITY would be the perfect vehicle to utilize. By the time you felt they were old enough to handle all of the material, it would probably be too late.
SICK CITY makes Jim Thompson's novels look like Little Golden Books. And I love Thompson's work. There were times that I wondered, Why are you reading this? But just like Jeffrey and Randal, I couldn't stop. And I'm going to find O'Neill's other novels, too. By the way, the Mark Twain Hotel that O'Neill describes here is a real place.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
Tony O'Neill's novel is about drugs and the people who take them and are addicted to them. Pure and simple with no apologies. O'Neill knows of what he speaks and writes authoritatively on the subject. What SICK CITY does is takes the grit and grime of, say, NAKED LUNCH by William Burroughs and makes it coherent --- no cut-up technique here --- within the context of a caper novel, as imagined by Elmore Leonard. To put it another way, it consists of the parts of the movie Pulp Fiction that couldn't be filmed. The camera lens would have burned out.
SICK CITY neither explicitly condemns nor implicitly glorifies drug addiction. It simply provides an unblinking and stark look at the lives of a number of people, including a down-and-out exotic dancer, a homosexual prostitute in denial, a host of addicts and drug dealers, and a drug rehabilitation guru who is nursing his own nasty little secret. Points of view change frequently, and you might want to take this book in one long sitting in order to appreciate just how fascinating it is to watch everyone's lives intersect with each other. When the dust settles and the smoke clears, however, the book is about Jeffrey and Randall, two irredeemable junkies who acquire --- along with cash and some extremely strong controlled substances --- a sex tape involving Sharon Tate and a number of deceased celebrities. They want to sell it for a fortune --- gainful employment is not high on the "to do" list of either gentleman --- but along the way they attract the attention and ire of Pat, an extremely dangerous and unbalanced drug dealer who is out for revenge.
Most of SICK CITY occurs where the buses don't run, and even if they did, those who are in their right minds would never want to go there. And if you wandered into those areas by accident, you would call OnStar to come send a helicopter to get you the heck out. Even if you have not led a sheltered life, there are scenes here that you have never encountered before and probably never will see again: acts of physical and sexual violence --- some voluntary, some not so much --- that you would be hard-pressed to make up on your own. O'Neill's writing is shot through with such straight-ahead prose that the book reads more like a documentary, in the best sense, than a work of fiction.
And, while I have the feeling that this was not his intent, it is possibly one of the most anti-drug treatises I have ever read. The subject matter is such that you wouldn't read it to your 12-year-old, yet if you wanted to warn them away from that first hit of speed, SICK CITY would be the perfect vehicle to utilize. By the time you felt they were old enough to handle all of the material, it would probably be too late.
SICK CITY makes Jim Thompson's novels look like Little Golden Books. And I love Thompson's work. There were times that I wondered, Why are you reading this? But just like Jeffrey and Randal, I couldn't stop. And I'm going to find O'Neill's other novels, too. By the way, the Mark Twain Hotel that O'Neill describes here is a real place.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Nosebleed Fiction
6 Aug 2010
Format:Paperback
Sick City is pretty raw stuff. More plot-driven than Tony O'Neill's memoirish other books but still set in the same milieu (junkies scrabbling to get it together in LA, but just digging themselves deeper in a series of harrowing and sometimes hilarious setpieces), the novel is an excellent, disturbing, entertaining, and illuminating chronicle of two guys trying to sell the ultimate porn tape. They have all the tools to get rich, they just can't stop screwing up.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Amazing Journey
18 April 2011
Format:Paperback
I read this cover to cover on an airplane and the time flew by. I was completely emersed in the characters and the story. This is the first book I've read by O'Neill and I will certainly be coming back for more. Slash's blurb on the front cover couldn't have been more accurate.
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