User

About this book

He is the son of a black derelict and a white New Ager, a beautifully toned specimen of urban male beauty, and a New York City street hustler. His special gift is reeling in his customers, who flip to him like spawning salmon. His greatest pleasure is feeling his eyes about to roll back, as the Dilaudid he has just injected races through his veins and begins licking his brain. His name is Apollo, and he is one of the most disturbing and seductive creations in recent American fiction. Bruce Benderson's User takes you into his world - a shocking world filled with stark yet hypnotic eroticism, mined with terrors peculiar to the subterranean big city in the hours after midnight. It is a world of crack dens and hideaway clubs that come dangerously to life after the rest of the city shuts down, where a half-illiterate, drug-addicted male prostitute spends more time with the entitled, the creative, and the rich than most celebrities dream possible...where justice is enforced by a cop in a flawless tuxedo, with a fierce and foxy transsexual on his arm...where a voyeuristic John finds thrills watching hustlers shoot up...and where an HIV-positive Ivy League dropout tries to salvage Apollo from the demons he himself has failed to escape.

Themes & subjects