Dark Ride by Lou Berney

 

This turned out to be a remarkably impressive piece of stoner noir. The POV/narrator is kinda baked for a lot of it, even as he's changing into someone who probably won't be smoking anything like as much weed in the foreseeable future. There's a strong whiff of bildungsroman in this, in addition to heavy dollops of noir classics (there's a strong whiff of Hammet and/or Chandler, here) but it comes across as very much its own thing. The POV character is neat and well-drawn, and the other characters are reasonably distinct--the POV is strong enough he might be misreading elements of them, but that's a thing that sometimes happens with first-person. The ending is a bit of a gut-punch, always a possibility with noir of any kind, but it's earned, and appropriate, and the story threads in the novel do mostly resolve. I don't think I've read anything by Berney before this, I'll be looking for more.