Hello Down There (1993) by Michael Parker

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Hello Down There (1993)

by Michael Parker

Elizabeth City, North Carolina

North Carolina 15/20

   All the titles left in this chapter of the 1,001 Novels project are physical or ebooks- no more Audiobooks available.  That means these are the most obscure titles left, since every book with any kind of track record gets an Audiobook editions these days.  Hello Down There is a work of historical fiction about a university student who becomes addicted to morphine in the 1950's after sustaining a back-injury.  He's the oldest son of a wealthy local family (they own the building that contains the local pharmacy) and his addiction is the kind where he bullies the local pharmacist into supplying him drugs in excess of what he is legally allowed to possess.   It's a gentrified addiction, in other words.  

  He draws others into his orbit, notably the daughter of the pharmacist, and he spirits her away to the prison in Kentucky which happened to possess the first drug detox facility in the United States.  It's not unfamiliar literary territory- William Burroughs writes about the same place in Junky.   Hello Down There is another first novel and it's hard not to think there is some biographical elements involved even taking into account the historical setting.  I would imagine that Parker is from the same area.  Parker's drug-addled, well educated protagonist is a welcome respite from the legions of troubled adolescent girls that editor Susan Straight favors, but there wasn't a huge amount of action here and the central relationship between Parker's drug addled college-educated protagonist and his uneducated teen-age boo was not revelatory.