Descent
In this modern retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice, rock star Thrash Pearson returns alone to Brooklyn from his honeymoon after watching his wife die from a lethal snake bite. He has only a few weeks—time he thought he’d spend moving into a cozy house in Brooklyn—before his band goes on tour again. Now Thrash struggles to recover from his grief and find the motivation to be the frontman of Argo the world is expecting to see.
Facing pressure from his manager and bandmates to move on, Thrash takes an unfortunate turn towards darker methods of coping. Thrash swore he wouldn’t do drugs again, but he can’t resist when Jason’s girlfriend, Maddy, offers him an experimental pill called heart’s ease. The drug sends him on vivid trips through the underworld of the New York City subway where Thrash finds his beloved Lily, and he’ll do anything to bring her back.
On the road with endless interviews, Jason and Maddy’s volcanic relationship, and a grueling tour schedule, Thrash’s only retreat becomes the visions from the heart’s ease until one bad trip puts him in the hospital. Thrash thought he lost it all when Lily died, but if he can’t pull himself together and finish out this tour, then he’s either going to lose his career—or his life.
DESCENT is the first novel from Grace Dunn.
Excerpt:
Recreational drugs. Thrash always thought that phrase was a little too ironic. It’s all just ‘recreational’ until it takes over your life and you come to in your bathtub, naked under a blanket, and your fingers are dripping blood from the kitchen knife you’re gripping to protect yourself from the kidnappers you’d sworn you’d seen break in while you were high as a fucking kite.
That disaster put Thrash in rehab four years ago.
The part that pissed Thrash off the most, though, was that he was the only one who got so out of control. Why could the other guys do a few lines of coke at parties and then leave it all behind with a laugh? None of them were left hiding alone and bleeding in their bathtub. They didn’t have mind-shredding, skin-crawling coke hallucinations like Thrash did.
It was never fair.
Stats:
Word Count: 95,000
Genre: Thriller, Mythology Retelling