Junkie Love

A story of recovery and redemption.

"A voice filled with sincerity, salvation, and splendor. A voice as stark, unforgiving, and mesmerizing as blood backing into the needle." ~ J.A. Kazimer, The Ampersand Review

From the cow fields of Connecticut to the streets of San Francisco, Joe Clifford’s Junkie Love traverses the lost highways of America, down the rocky roads of mental illness to the dead ends of addiction. Based on Clifford’s own harrowing experience with drugs as a rock ’n’ roll wannabe in the 1990s, the book draws on the best of Kerouac & the Beats, injecting a heavy dose of pulp fiction as it threads a rollicking narrative through a doomed love triangle, lit up by the many strange characters he meets along the way. Part road story, part resurrection tale, Junkie Love finds a way to laugh in one’s darkest hour, while never abandoning its heart in search of a home.

Junkie Love by Joe Clifford is an original ride through the down-and-dirty underside of the drug and music scene, inspired and propelled by Jack Kerouac’s youthful dreams of an American nirvana, translated to a later, darker generation. Clifford is its passionate spokesman.

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Praise for Junkie Love

"Joe Clifford’s Junkie Love portrays high-heeled heroin amour, beautiful and vicious, full of front seat hot sex and brutal cop raids, secret rehab gropes and smack-fueled crime sprees. In prose that speeds like a stolen car, Clifford does for opiated romance what Michael Herr did for war and F.X. Toole for prize fights: brings mind-blowing news from hells beyond imagining." - Alan Kaufman, author of Jew Boy and The Outlaw Bible of American Literature

"No one writes this good the first time out, do they? Joe Clifford’s Junkie Love is a literary achievement of the first order. Junkie Love is both harrowing and haunting, hypnotic and hilarious. Clifford can flat-out tell a story. He’s savvy, insightful, and fearless. Trust me, here’s a world that’s more vivid, unnerving, and compelling than the one you’re living in, written with the exhilaration and abandon of an improbable survivor." - John Dufresne, author of Requiem, Mass (a People magazine’s Book Pick of the Week)

"Joe Clifford reminds us that even in the most punishing circumstances, the human heart doesn’t just struggle or abide, it points the way home. Junkie Love is a savage, funny, ravishing gift of a book, strangely gentle and beautifully strange. Like Jimmy Santiago Baca’s A Place to Stand, it reveals that man in extremis is the man in the mirror, and that our own humanity resides precisely in the willingness to see the irreparable fault lines in our own souls, to witness despite the impenetrable darkness: to love." - David Corbett, author of Blood of Paradise and Do They Know I’m Running?