Absolute gut punch. Starts out tricking you into thinking it's one thing -- a relatively sympathetic portrait of a lonely writer looking back on his naive but optimistic past through diaries from the 1970s that he rediscovers -- but gradually, sneakily becomes something else. This is a corruption narrative. It's darkly funny in places, deeply sad, and with some unnervingly resonant passages about memory and artistic integrity and who and what we value on the path up, and the path down. I had to read it slowly because it kept cutting my legs out from under me in different ways.

For anyone else who, like me, is partially here for trashy IWTV reasons: eerily, Bogosian's protagonist here shares a lot in common with Daniel Molloy, drugs, bicuriosity, tape recorder and all. But like, if he were evil and sucked -- and not in a fun vampire way.

It feels weird and fated that Bogosian wrote this back in 2009. But it also stands alone as an absolute wallop of a novel.