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Lloyd, a strung-out former Big-Pharma copy cranker—a “Side Effects Specialist” who coined the term “anal leakage”—narrates Stahl’s latest junkie novel (after Pain Killers and Bad Sex on Speed), as well as a prologue he accurately describes as “the world’s longest cocktail napkin.” Lloyd’s on the lam after a failed pharmacy heist with other jonesing copywriters from the dating site Christian Swingles, when he falls for a mysterious beauty sitting in the Greyhound bus seat next to him. Nora Funk, who claims to write greeting cards, wants to destroy her old boss: “I want to fuck with him... the worst way you fuck with anybody.” Lloyd proffers his help, and descends into “a particular demoralization that comes from thinking you were out of the woods, and then the woods turn out to be a park, and the park’s in front of the Petrified Forest. Which is full of man-eating boars. Who only eat men who look like you.” Stahl’s fans will forgive the halting start and sudden end to this fleshed-out satiric novella, at the heart of which lies a transgression too obscene—and too sharply revealing of Americans’ complicity in big-business ills—to describe here. (Nov.)