Chris Leek
Independent Reviewer
| Bio Blog |
Unless you
have been living under a rock in the Atacama desert for the past couple of weeks, you can’t have
failed to notice that Gutter gladiator and all round good guy, Joe Clifford has a new novel out. Yes, that’s
right another one. Here's why I think you should buy it.
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| Order from Amazon |
Buzzcocks’
lead singer Pete Shelly once posed the question: Ever fallen in love with
someone you shouldn’t have fallen in love with? Joe Clifford did just that,
although in his case it was more of a something than a someone. He fell in love
with an ideal that only ever really existed in the minds of writers like
Kerouac and Burroughs. He chased his runaway American dream across the
continent from Connecticut to San Francisco. In the end, it nearly killed him.
Junkie Love is Joe Clifford’s second novel and as
he says in his introduction, one way or another it has taken him most of his
life to complete. It is indeed a love story, although not necessarily in the conventional
boy meets girl sense; chemical romance is never that straight forward.
This is ten
years of Joe’s life laid bare, at times both brutal and horrific, but always
compelling. He is not ashamed of his past and nor should he be. Everybody fucks
it up to a greater or lesser degree, but not everybody has the strength of will
required to pull back from the brink or the stones to write so honestly about
it.
It’s a hard
book to read and an even harder one to put down. We already knew that Joe could
write; that fact was never up for debate. With Junkie Love he does something that goes way beyond just putting
words on the page. He tells it exactly like it is and more importantly what it
was like to live it.
His absorbing
narrative refuses point blank to glorify or romanticize drug addiction and instead
goes a long way towards explaining it for the masses. Joe talks about the things
Jack Kerouac conveniently forgot to mention. The infected sores and the
collapsed veins, the burned bridges and broken promises, the appalling squalor that
pervades the life of an addict and what it is really like to be ground into the
dirt under the boot heel of a cruel and needy bitch called heroin.
Now this may
sound like the reader is in for a bit of a pummeling and while it’s not all
blunt works and bad deals, you are going to have to take a few shots, but roll
with them and you will be richly rewarded with a deeply moving and truly
amazing novel.
In years to come this
may well go on to be seen as Joe Clifford’s magnum opus. I firmly believe that
book hasn’t been written yet. Trust me, there is more to come from a talent as big as Joe’s. That doesn’t mean to say Junkie
Love shouldn’t be considered required reading for the human race.
I thought I
knew what to expect from Joe’s story. I have witnessed something similar,
albeit from a distance. But I wasn’t prepared for the raw power of this
novel or the impact it would have on me. If I had a time machine I would go
back twenty years, give a copy to a friend of mine and make sure she read it
from cover to cover. Who knows, it might have saved her.
Junkie Love is a hell of a book and one I will
never forget. When you think about it that really is all you can ask for.
