Happy Mutant Baby Pills

August 26, 2013
Lloyd, a strung-out former Big-Pharma copy cranker—a “Side Effects Specialist” who coined the term “anal leakage”—narrates Stahl’s latest junkie novel (after Pain Killers and Bad Sex on Speed), as well as a prologue he accurately describes as “the world’s longest cocktail napkin.” Lloyd’s on the lam after a failed pharmacy heist with other jonesing copywriters from the dating site Christian Swingles, when he falls for a mysterious beauty sitting in the Greyhound bus seat next to him. Nora Funk, who claims to write greeting cards, wants to destroy her old boss: “I want to fuck with him... the worst way you fuck with anybody.” Lloyd proffers his help, and descends into “a particular demoralization that comes from thinking you were out of the woods, and then the woods turn out to be a park, and the park’s in front of the Petrified Forest. Which is full of man-eating boars. Who only eat men who look like you.” Stahl’s fans will forgive the halting start and sudden end to this fleshed-out satiric novella, at the heart of which lies a transgression too obscene—and too sharply revealing of Americans’ complicity in big-business ills—to describe here.

August 15, 2013
Stahl's (Pain Killers, 2009, etc.) eighth novel trips through the travails of Lloyd, copywriter and heroin junkie. And what a trip it is: ribald, tumbling through a don't-look-back narrative, laced with rude, wicked and beyond-the-edge social observations. Lloyd is "[a]nother doomed DeLillo with a day job," a career path spiraling downward from writing sanitized pharmaceutical side effects warnings through Penthouse Forum fake letters to disingenuous shills for Christian Swingles, a dating site. Lloyd is fueled by heroin, his maintenance drug after a career of "Plexiglas-cut crack, questionable E, bathtub crank." It's only self-destructive until he's conned into a fake robbery by Swingle cohorts and then exiled by Greyhound from Tulsa to LA. In transit, he meets Nora, a "buxom bad-attitude pixie...and...wanna-martyr." Nora's paranoia seduces him into murder; her addicting sexuality prompts him to commit another. In LA, Lloyd signs on as a writer specializing in sexual perversion deaths for the CSI franchise. What appears to be a sendup of big pharma, television from Bruckheimer to Oprah, genetically modified organisms, Christian dating, Oral Roberts and the greeting card industry then veers into eco-surrealism. Nora claims pregnancy, the sire, a high-powered CEO, and after a quick segue into the foibles of Occupy-rallying LA hippies, Nora begins ingesting chemicals--"half the sprays and solvents in the household cleaning aisle, along with enough of the Physicians' Desk Reference to fill the trunk of a Buick." Nora intends to birth a mutant baby--"a message, a global warning, a kind of toxic inoculation of the entire species." No cheers are due Lloyd or Nora, and supporting characters are equally deformed, including former Christian Swingle workmates Jay and Riegle, a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern pairing fantasizing about riding Nora's pregnancy into reality television wealth. 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.

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November 1, 2013
As a Side Effects Specialist, Lloyd wrote copy for a large pharmaceutical company. His latest writing gig is for Christian Swingles, an online dating service. His remaining energies are devoted to doing his own drug-taking. Then Lloyd gets involved in a plan to rob a local pharmacy. But when the robbery goes horribly wrong, he finds himself on the lam. Grabbing the first Greyhound out of town, he meets Nora, a young woman running from her own demons and fueled by her own varied drug supply. Lloyd instantly falls in love with her, ultimately becoming a pawn in Nora's grandiose project to do harm to the mystery man who got her pregnant and to warn society at large of the dangerous chemical-laden world we live in. With a nod to Katherine Dunn's Geek Love (1989), Stahl (Permanent Midnight, 1995) has created a dark and twisted world, one that challenges our notions of love and beauty. 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)