Carr Brian Allen

Full of gorgeous language and wild insights.--Nick Flynn Set in the beleaguered heart of Indiana's opioid crisis, Brian Allen Carr's timely and tender novel about a teen struggling to find his place in the world--and come up with $800 rent--is at once a moving rumination on the hopeful power of story and a harrowing insight into modern America. It is a book you won't soon forget. Seventeen-year-old Riggle is living in rural Indiana with his uncle and uncle's girlfriend after the death of his parents. Now his uncle is missing, probably on a drug binge. It's Monday, and $800 in rent is due Friday. Riggle, who's been suspended from school, has to either find his uncle or get the money together himself. His mission exposes him to a motley group of Opioid locals--encounters by turns perplexing, harrowing, and heartening. With empathy and insight, Carr explores what it's like to be a high school kid in the age of Trump--a time of economic inequality, addiction, Confederate flags, and mass shootings. Through the voice of its unforgettable protagonist--charismatic, confused, searching, by turns cynical and na ve, wise and impulsive--Opioid, Indiana pierces to the heart of our moment.

The sickness started with a single child and quickly spread: you could get high by drinking your own shadow. Artificial lights were destroyed so addicts could sip shadow at night in the pure moonlight. Gangs of shadow addicts chased down children on playgrounds, rounded up old ladies from retirement homes. Cities were destroyed and governments fell. And if your shadow was sipped entirely, you became one of them, had to drink the shadows of others or go mad. One hundred and fifty years later, what's left of the world is divided between the highly regimented life of those inside dome cities who are protected from natural light (and natural shadows), and those forced to the dangerous, hardscrabble life in the wilds outside. In rural Texas, Mira, her shadow-addicted-friend Murk, and an ex-domer named Bale search for a possible mythological cure to the shadow sickness-but they must find it, it is said, before the return of Halley's Comet, which is only days away.