Customer Reviews

Sick City: A Novel

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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

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.

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.

I met the author when I was 18 and became somewhat obsessed with his writing, first the poetry, then the novels. I don't read nearly as much as I used to, having developped other obsessions: music, art and drinking much more shots than my liver can handle. I recently picked up Sick City, read it over a few days and was glad to see that I could still finish a book. I was even happier to find the same desperate, appealing drive that fueled his start as a writer. The material/topic is crude and at times uncomfortable but it's protrayed with lot of sensitivity, like an optimist writing about suicide. That's not to take away from his sincere, genuine experience with the subject matter nor his unusual writing talent. He can write simple phone conversations between junkies and book acknowledgments with the same intensity and style as the most climatic scenes.
Anyone who gets an opportunity to see him read live should do so, because he delivers his work well and with a very peculiar accent. Finally, it is beyond refreshing to read a book written by someone who is still young and alive, especially when a lot of avid readers only like dead people's work.

O'Neill's version of Hell is recreated in the changing fortunes of two protagonists who meet in a recovery house run by none other than the famed "Dr. Mike", a send-up of the big business of the recovery industry and its celebrated icons, albeit with feet of clay. Randal and Jeffrey meet as roommates. Randal is the son of a Hollywood family given one last chance to redeem himself and walk away from a meth habit. Of lesser stock, Jeffrey is just a tattooed and grotesquely needle-scarred junkie. But Jeffrey is in possession of a unique item that, given Randal's connections, will purchase their way to economic freedom. A plan is set in motion, Jeffrey released before Randal. But given the malcontents and soulless killers of the drug culture, fantasies hit the ground with a thud as each man's habit calls seductively from the sidelines, a rattling skeleton waving a needle or a pipe.

While the satire of the recovery business- and Dr. Mike- is entertaining, the real story is in the relationship of the two men hoping for one big score. And while old Hollywood beckons, with its own freak show of wealthy addicts of one kind or another, the streets give no quarter, the decadence of chasing the dragon a hard sell to any but the most committed addict. Love it or hate it, O'Neill captures this scene with eerie ease, as comfortable in the roach-infested dens of desperate junkies and killers as one who speaks from experience. And like Jerry Stahl's Permanent Midnight, this is no romantic tale of hail fellows well met, but a plunge into hell to the strain of death's siren song, junk the road to temporary nirvana. Tough story, great writing, but it will leave you chilled, a netherworld where it's all about the moment and the quest for more. So much for the War on Drugs. Luan Gaines/2010.

In America, it seems celebrity holds the ultimate trump card. Over politics, over professions, over self-destruction, no status says you've achieved success like turning what you've done into celebrity. And yet, while Sick City at first unabashedly acknowledges this state of affairs, its heroes also tell us something else about the `American Dream'...

True, O'Neill gives us the full portrait of TV star doctors, movie producers and grotesque painters as a setting for his tightly-woven story about what amounts to an uber-contemporary art heist. But our two heroes, Jeffrey, a gay junkie prostitute from the U.K., and Randal, also a junkie and cast-off screw-up from a royal family of movie producers, manage to reveal something of their own about the art of connivance...

In their attempt to collect top dollar for a Sharon Tate sex tape, the reader discovers something unexpected: that the landscape of the down and out, the run down hotels, the bombed out barrooms and the anonymous piss-stalls of LA, can be ally as much as adversary. And, rendered in O'Neill's prose, as a perverse, meth-head Yoda might say: "a beautiful ally it is." For we learn, in words crystal clear, fast moving and somehow ornate, that to have no money at all can be very similar to having all the money in the world in the sense that in neither state do you have to answer to anyone.

True, Randal and Jeffrey pay a high price in finding ways to overcome brutal thugs, psychotic recovery professionals and their own vicious addictions. In fact, some of these they don't overcome (I won't say which). And yet, by the end of the novel, while celebrity still holds a trump card, it is the art of survival that controls the score. We are left wondering what winning really is. For though we are trained that sobriety is always better than addiction, wealth than poverty and fame than obscurity, Sick City inspires us to question whether we should, in the words of the illustrious Phil Collins: "Think twice/ 'Cause it's another day for you and me in paradise."

Okay, Sick City is sick; in a good way. Trying to watch as these two junkies Jeffrey and Randal try and survive in Hollywood is an amusement ride all onto itself. I enjoyed reading this book and seeing a world that I couldn't even imagine. Kudos to author Tony O'Neill for giving an extreme insight to the world of the wild and underbelly of the Hollywood drug scene.

Put down the remote and read this book!! It's a lot better than nearly everything on television. I read this book in a week--and it took that long because I did not want the book to end!! I like that Tony is writing in the third person, this medium allows him to make full use of his immense writing talent. I think this book is a classic. To say it is merely a crime-novel is to somehow discredit what Mr. O' Neill has acccomplished. He gives us HOLLYWOOD, wild and out of control, and to greater extent an American culture at large. Addiction is not something that just happens in Hollywood. His creatique of celebrity rehab, is scathing and funny at the same time. It's kinda like Kerouac's On The Road, except the book goes from LA to Vegas. From glittering hollywood mansions to cracked out LA drug spots. But O'Neill as an author, has none of Kerouac's romanticism. All the characters are in hell and: alcohol, Chinese heroin, meth, crack, coke and lucre are all the Devil. O'Neill is able to engage the reader with all senses, one feels as if they taking this long, brutal, humorous and dangerous ride along with the characters. But his greatest skill as a writer, seems to be his uncanny facility to engage the sixth sense--the unspeakable silences that people often have between each other, or the telepathic. You won't regret reading this book.

Honestly reading Sick City is the most fun I've had reading a book in a long while. Tony is a master literary entertainer: he balances suspense, odd situations, uncliche handling of drugs and sex, taboo, and just plain weird L.A. freaks in the best kind of pageturning moves, without letting up on the sentence level. Sick City is an L.A. collage of junkies, reality TV oddballs, weird snuff memorabilia collectors, S&M, and tons of drugs. It's funny, breaks the boundaries of its genre, at times powerfully creepy, and overall a book that doesn't let go in its sick pleasure.

I've read everything this guy has written. Sick City may even be his best yet. His other novels, Digging the Vein and Down and Out on Murder Mile, are outstanding, too,so that's saying a lot. Sick City is Tony O' Neill at his best- straightforward prose, detailing the underbelly of LA life. His characters are raw and believable and funny, too. This is no bull writing, which makes for fantastic reading- unputdownable.