Tony Diggs plays guitar and sings for The New Left, a rock group based in Harrisburg, PA. As the book opens, Tony is trying to salvage his stuff from his ex-girlfriend's house and move in with his new pseudo-girlfriend Cindy and her mother Lois. It doesn't take long before he's sleeping with both. Suddenly, instead of being a poor musician working a crappy factory job, he's some kind of gigolo, dealing with woman drama and trying to keep all of their addictions in check. In between pacifying the boss, juggling women, and cooking breakfast, he finds time to practice with the band and make his presence known in the local music scene.

The narrative is presented in stripped-down first person. Brief sentences capture the no-frills approach to life of the main character. Tony Diggs is a troubled guy with complex problems who finds himself constantly surrounded by opiates both narcotic and social. For the most part, ‘Dollhouse’ keeps in the moment, only flashing back a small handful of times. It's a book about real life, despite all the efforts of the characters to deaden that feeling. Though simply written, this is no straightforward tale of underworld hijinx. The drugs, the fighting, and the dirty sex are all there, but Boyle manages to capture the psychological atmosphere, the overwhelming feeling of futility that keeps the characters hurrying away from solitary sobriety. The novel is insidiously haunting in much the same way as Albert Camus' ‘The Stranger‘. Tony hates being slated for failure. He's an intelligent guy and he's passionate about what he does, but when he looks around him, all he sees are people who are fallen or falling. In the words of the protagonist, "The world was flat and I was falling off the edge." Despite all of his hopes and daydreams about the band, Tony knows that they were doomed from the start. Taking care of everyone sobers him and makes him more responsible just as everything around him is becoming more chaotic. As he enters the up-and-down process of kicking the opiates and getting back into cigarettes, the narrative comes apart, but in a perfectly deliberate way, jammed up chunks of prose revealing the mental state of the narrator.

Occasional metaphors and analogies aside, psychological observations manifest themselves mostly in the form of actions instead of narratorial intrusion. It's an elegant skill that Boyle has mastered. In the following passage, for instance, Tony has dropped his bandmate's girlfriend off at her place, at which point she gives him some codeine: "When I got outside, I threw them in the street, got in my car and started it. Then I got out of my car and picked the pills up, put them back in my pocket." It's this kind of efficiency that makes ‘Dollhouse’ a story that's much longer than its 170 pages.

I really can't recommend this book enough. Readers and writers alike should find an engaging story with enough substance to justify a place on the reread shelf. Thieves Jargon consistently blurs the intersection between underground, pulp, and literature, and this third addition to the Thieves Jargon Press line does not disappoint. Do yourself and the small press a favour and go buy this book.

D. Richard Scannell comes from central New Jersey. Reading the climax of ‘Moby-Dick’ when Ishmael and Ahab fight off the pod of whales with their bare hands was a pivotal moment in his life. He thought he was going to be an electrical engineer for a while, but then he got an opportunity to see what it was really like, and he decided that capacitors and dark basements weren't for him. Instead he studied English and German at Penn State. German possesses a mystical quality, something like unfiltered cigarettes stuffed with aloe leaves—raw, violent, cleansing. He retained a love of computers and programming from his engineering days, skills that come in handy. His current project is ForTheHermits.com, a website that combines flash fiction and illustration. It updates once a week and gives him a consistent relief from the insanity of introspection. Someday, he may do something really exciting, but for now, he's content to scribble down ideas in notebooks. To read a selection of his poetry on the showcase section of this site, click here.