Happy Mutant Baby Pills: A Novel
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. --Carol Gladstein