Ride - Paperback

by Andrew Lafleche (Author)

Ride is for those caught in the grip of addiction and for the ones who love them, desperate to understand.

Ride possesses an unnerving air of documentary reality that's heartbreaking and authentic at the same time. This searing novel is a dizzying spiral of desperation set in the early 2000s in St. Catharines, Ontario. High school is over, an ex-girlfriend is pregnant, and Troy Brinkman is losing control. Having just moved out of his parent's home, Troy enters a landscape of limitless moral entropy where everybody drinks copious amounts of alcohol, snorts mountains of cocaine, and swallows as many Ecstasy pills as they can get their hands on.

When he's not seething for his next high, Troy cruises parties, strip-clubs, and bars for action in a desperate attempt to avoid coming to terms with his best friend's attempted suicide. In this binge-life, Troy recognizes his impending doom and tries to renew feelings for his ex-girlfriend, Danielle, his sole through-line that connects Troy to who he was before his habits became him. It's this struggle which threatens to get the better of, consume, and ultimately destroy his dreams.

Ride is the millennial's contemporary version of the classic 1960s counterculture novel, an authentic, unrelenting, and strangely exhilarating episodic group portrait of blasted lives. Readers will catch familiar whiffs of the nihilism and loneliness in the darkest writings of Thompson, Bukowski, and Jack Kerouac in Lafleche's gritty 'sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll' world of excess, self-gratification, and black comedy.