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Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus
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English
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HAPPY MUTANT BABY PILLS

Jerry Stahl

Lloyd has a particular set of skills. He writes the small print for prescription 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).

Jerry Stahl is the author of Permanent Midnight; I, Fatty; Perv—a Love Story; and Plainclothes Naked. He has written extensively for film and television, and his work has appeared in Esquire, Details, Playboy, and other publications.

"Jerry Stahl is one of our last defenders against the darkness, and Happy Mutant Baby Pills is a deeply funny and devastating warning label for the world we live in, a world that is ultimately, as Stahl brilliantly demonstrates, one giant side effect." - Sam Lipsyte

"A dope-fueled hellride to the black heart of New Weird America. Stahl turns his satirical scalpel on Big Pharma, environmental contamination, conspiracy theorists, the Occupy movement, CSI, Christian swingles, and adult babies, eviscerating our silly/scary society in search of its soul. Profoundly disturbing, profoundly funny, and profoundly moving." - Richard Lange

"Jerry Stahl is the American hipster bard." (James Ellroy)
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Published 2103-11-01 by HarperPerennial

Comments

“Ribald, tumbling through a don't-look-back narrative, laced with rude, wicked and beyond-the-edge social observations / / A grotesque and lurid allegorical tale, this is not for the faint of heart. Bukowski spawned the School of Dirty Realism. Consider this Dirty Surrealism, social satire as aberrant hipster irony.”

“With read-aloud quality prose and characters we can't look away from, HAPPY MUTANT BABY PILLS is a deeply disturbing, deeply funny look at a society desperately in need of assistance.”

“If you're a fan of Palahniuk or Vonnegut, you should be rushing out to buy HAPPY MUTANT BABY PILLS. You should crack it open the minute you get home and chew your way through it in one sitting / / Its greatest strength is that it's written by one of modern satire's great unblinking stylists.”

“A desolate portrait of modern American mores and obsessions / / HAPPY MUTANT BABY PILLS is a wild ride, a comical descent into the carefully choreographed madness of contemporary American culture.”