Opioid, Indiana by Brian Allen Carr

 

This is a pretty good and interesting novel, maybe novella--the book's like just over 200 pages, and typeset with a lot of whites space. It's not really in any genre that I can identify, in a more reasonable time it'd probably be something like mainstream, but I guess it's probably literary, or at least it has aspirations in that direction; these days "mainstream fiction" is ... barely a thing, or maybe the mainstream these days is Romance (the genre, which is the engine that powers publishing). Anyway, this is pretty gritty small-town fiction with a late teenager staring mostly unblinkingly at rapidly approaching adulthood; a moment of smartassery leads vaguely to his being suspended from school for a week, and he uses that week to figure some things out about himself and his place in the world. His future looks ... pretty OK, if not exactly bright, though I wouldn't say the story exactly has a happy ending. Lots of nice turns of phrase, the POV/narrator seems pretty spot-on.