New Book Alert: Addictarium: The War Stories Chronicles by Nicole D'Settemi; A Disturbing, Confusing but Unforgettable Novel of Addiction and Recovery

New Book Alert: Addictarium: The War Stories Chronicles by Nicole D'Settemi; A Disturbing, Confusing but Unforgettable Novel of Addiction and Recovery

By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews




Spoilers: Nicole D'Settemi's Addictarium is different from your typical novel about drug addiction. Most of the novels focus on the addict, how they got started, and why they turned to drugs. The Reader will learn about their addiction and how it destroyed the addict and their friends and family. Then there will be the obligatory near-death rock bottom moment when the addict realizes that they need help and enter recovery where they then emerge a better stronger person who now vows to live a clean drug free life.

Well Addictarium is not that kind of book. Nicole D'Settemi's disturbing and at times confusing book begins where most books about addiction ends. It's not so much about the addiction as it is about the recovery from it and what happens when the people who are assigned to help the addict recover are worse than they are.

Danielle Martino is a heroin addict. The prologue and first chapter speed through her addiction where she moves from overachiever upper middle class student to troubled, sick, and paranoid addict in the space of a few paragraphs.

There are some pretty graphic moments such as when she turns to prostitution to feed her addiction and when the effects turn her partially blind before she decides to seek recovery.

Mostly, D'Settemi focuses on Danielle's discovery of The Village, an upscale rehabilitation center which promises compassionate care to its patients. Finding nothing to lose except her addiction, Danielle checks in.


Most of the book deals with the power struggles Danielle has with the counselors and other patients as well as her longing to return to heroin. Many of the patients have hang ups of their own. After Danielle breaks up with her boyfriend on the outside and her best friend leaves, she becomes involved with Sasha, a female patient in a romance that is emotional, moving, but at the same time tense and borderline obsessive. Things get even more heated when Sasha leaves and the feelings of abandonment consume Danielle to the point where she wants to start using again.

As bad as the patients are, the staff of the Village are just as disturbing. There are many restrictions and rules which the patients question but are ordered to follow. Many of the counselors treat the patients with contempt and disdain rather than real concern for their well-being and recovery. Compassionate care apparently doesn’t really exist in this nightmare rehab dojo.

Of particular notice are the behaviors of two counselors. One, Nehemiah takes advantage of female patients before he gets fired for having a sex and drugs ring on the side. There are also other staff members who break boundaries with the patients.

While Nehemiah and some of the others are clear jerks, even the most helpful can be the most harmful. Danielle becomes obsessively infatuated with her primary counselor Angel. She thinks about him when he isn't around. She constantly worries about what he would think. He is trying to help her recover from her addiction but she confuses his concern for love.

Rather than let her down gently, Angel encourages her behavior to the point that after he leaves his position, the two embark on an affair. There are some genuinely sweet moments where Danielle wants to give up and Angel encourages her to keep going.

However, they are tempered with the realization that their romance began when Angel was Danielle's counselor and that while Danielle pursued him, she was mentally ill. Angel should have resisted. It was on him to end it. Every time they are together, this Reader wants to scream “Dude! Boundaries!”

Also while he is more tender than Nehemiah, Angel is still using her in his own way and comes off no better than he is. He does not respect the counselor-patient link and believes that he is doing right by becoming involved with her. She needs someone to take care of her and he needs someone to take care of. It makes you wonder if they would still be together, if she recovers and he isn't her caregiver.


With patients,staff, and counselors looking out for themselves it's no wonder that Danielle has a hard time with her recovery. It is also no surprise when she is given a bag of heroin and succumbs once more to her addiction finding no acceptance in sobriety.

There are parts in the narrative that are confusing possibly purposely so. Characters overlap. The setting moves from the Village to the streets without any meaningful transition. It's hard to follow the actions of the plot when the setting and characters are lost.

This makes Danielle comes across as an Unreliable Narrator which could possibly be the point. Do the other patients have emotional problems or does Danielle see them that way? Are the staff really that cold or is Danielle resisting their attempts to help them justifying it in her head that they never wanted to help? Nehemiah was fired but was he a pervert or did Danielle believe patient's gossip and innuendo that he was? What about Angel? Did he really overstep his boundaries as a counselor or did Danielle believe he did?

Because of the confusion within Danielle's narration, the ending where she returns to therapy is ambiguous. Will she finally recover or will she fall into the same pattern and regress? The only one who can answer those questions is Danielle herself.

Classics Corner: American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis; A Rambling Book With a Truly Horrible Lead

Classics Corner: American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis; A Rambling Book With a Truly Horrible Lead


By Julie Sara Porter


Bookworm Reviews





Spoilers: Well with a title like American Psycho, you don't expect the protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis's classic psychological thriller to be a likeable kind-hearted hero. But the truth is, Patrick Bateman is a truly horrible hateful person whose journey presents two possibilities, neither of which are good: Either he is completely delusional and a complete vain and shallow character who believes killing people will satisfy his urges or he really is a deranged psychopath who gets his kicks slicing up prostitutes, homeless people, business rivals and anyone else who is unfortunate enough to be alone with him.





The book isn't really long in plot. Mostly it's a few months in Bateman's life in which he rambles on about brand names, his work as an investment banker, favorite musical groups, his obsession with reading about serial killers, parties with friends and cocaine, oh yeah and the times when he takes an unsuspecting victim to his apartment and stabs and mutilates his victim with an ice pick.





Naturally Bateman is not a likeable character, but he is also not a relatable, understandable, or even after a while an interesting character. He is written so broadly and farcical that it is really hard to be invested in such a character. Even some of the worst characters such as Crime and Punishment’s Raskolnikov, Native Son’s Bigger Thomas, and soon I will review The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo which features Lisbeth Salander, a young woman who does not mind giving rapists and killers of women bloody ends. With these characters, you don't support what they do but you may understand why they do it. But with Bateman, that moment never comes. He is shallow and pretentious at best and a demented violent abusive bigoted misogynist at worst.





Bateman begins most days with a beauty treatment that even supermodels or pageant contestants might find a bit much. Paragraph after paragraph goes into his skin care treatment, specific hair care regimen, and names specific clothing by their brand names. (In fact, a running gag throughout the book are the paragraphs of non-stop product placements where Bateman just describes brand after brand comparing and contrasting them.) With his regimen and brand loyalty, Bateman comes across as a man who is completely vain and cares about little else but his personal appearance.





Even before he makes his first kill, Bateman is about as darkly comic character as can be. While we are told he is an investment banker, we see him barely at work except in a few conversations with his secretary whom he believes has a crush on him.Instead he spends more time at endless clubs and dinner parties where he takes cocaine, flirts with the female guests, and constantly confuses arriving guests with other people in his life. The confusion suggests either Bateman is so self-involved that he doesn't care who the people are around him or his brain is addled that he can't recognize people anymore.


He also displays psychotic tendencies. If something doesn't go his way, Bateman will shout obscenities and describes how he wants to kill the person who offended him.


In one passage, Bateman and his colleagues show off their business cards and Bateman jealously considers killing those who had better cards than his.





The thoughts are only thoughts until Bateman makes his first kill. It is actually suspenseful as he follows his prey and overpowers her. This leads to other murders that become broader and uncomfortably more farcical as the book goes along. It is disconcerting when Bateman describes an extremely bloody kill in one chapter and then reviews the best and worst songs by Whitney Houston in the next. Bateman is so detached from his bloody work that he retreats to his status symbols instead of the moral, legal, and ethical implications. Even when Bateman is driven to confess, it’s less out of guilt than fear he will be caught because he killed people out of his usual M.O. a business rival and a child rather than prostitutes, homeless men, and bedmates who he shows little remorse for.


While American Psycho makes for interesting reading to get into the mind of a serial killer, after a while the murders get repetitive and the book runs far too long. After the tenth kill, the Reader thinks “Okay, okay we get it! Patrick Bateman is a murderous SOB. Are we done yet?”





While Bateman describes his kills in a graphic manner, there are implications that he is not as violent as he appears to be. When he goes on his murderous rants about killing other people, his friends don't react very much. This suggests that they are as soulless as he is or that he really didn't say or do those things and he is imagining his life as a serial killer. The latter possibility is also suggested when after Bateman meets a friend that he confesses the murders to, the friend laughs in his face and says that he had lunch days ago with the man Bateman believes he killed.





So either Patrick Bateman is a violent murdering psychopath or longs to be one. Neither possibility is good and neither make him interesting.

Weekly Reader: The Girl On The Train by Paula Hawkins; A Deep Psychological Thriller With An Unreliable Narrator

Weekly Reader: The Girl On The Train by Paula Hawkins; A Deep Psychological Thriller With An Unreliable Narrator
By Julie Sara Porter,
Bookworm Reviews

Spoilers: Rachel Watson, the protagonist of Paula Hawkins' psychological thriller, The Girl On the Train, is the very definition of the unreliable narrator. She is a character who gives her first person account of the events but it is hampered by her psychological state which is filled with rash judgments and blackouts caused by frequent alcoholism.

Rachel is a very depressed woman for many reasons. She turned to alcohol to cope with her inability to bear children. Her husband, Tom, left her for another woman and they live in Tom and Rachel's old home with their infant daughter. Rachel lost her job because of habitual drunkenness and still rides the train to and from work, convincing her roommate that she is still employed, but is actually job searching and beating herself up over her guilt and despair over her current situation.

While riding the train, she sees a seemingly happily married couple through a window. She becomes obsessed with the couple that she names "Jess" and "Jason" picturing their lives as perfect. She imagines Jason as a doctor and Jess as an art gallery owner and the two have a loving marriage of frequent sex, romantic dates, and amorous expressions. As Rachel's life spirals more out of control, she becomes obsessed with her imaginative perspective of Jess and Jason.

What is particularly fascinating is as we find out about Rachel's life, we also get into the lives of "Jess" and "Jason" which are hardly the paragons of perfection of Rachel's fantasy. Instead Jess, who is actually named Megan, is just as troubled as her observer. Megan is given to frequent anxiety attacks, feels stifled in her marriage to Scott (not "Jason"), and commits acts of infidelity with other men. The portrayals of Megan and Rachel reveal how little that we know of people. Even when we imagine they live lives better than ours, theirs may be the same or worse than our own.

Rachel's fantasies of Megan and Scott's life comes to a head when Megan turns up missing. Unfortunately, Rachel has no memory of the night Megan was missing and Tom says he saw her in the area in a violent drunken state, which needless to say does not bode well for an alibi. Hoping to make things right, Rachel ingratiates herself into the investigation and in Scott's life.

Tension mounts as Rachel cannot account for that missing time nor what happened or why she was bleeding afterwards. She becomes suspicious of Scott and of herself. The Reader has no preconceived knowledge of Rachel's actions so they are finding out events as she is. Hawkins also cleverly withholds information from The Reader until the time is right.

As the investigation continues, Rachel becomes the proverbial woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown always one drink away from oblivion. She knows she has a problem, but feels unable to do anything about it. Alcohol becomes a security blanket that she clings to until it chokes her with her avoidance of the troubles in her life and what happened to Megan.

It takes until Rachel learns the truth of that night from an unlikely source that she takes some positive changes to her life. She calls to question herself and the people around her including those she thought she could trust.
When Megan was a ghost, an unimaginable standard, Rachel felt that she was doomed to fall. Then when she learned the truth of who Megan was and the truth of her disappearance does Rachel take stock in her own life and seeks to change it. That's when Hawkins makes the Unreliable Narrator more Reliable.