Ride

By: Andrew Lafleche

Narrated by: Andrew Lafleche

Ride is for those caught in the grip of addiction and for the ones who love them, desperate to understand.

Ride possesses an unnerving air of documentary reality that’s heartbreaking and authentic at the same time. This searing novel is a dizzying spiral of desperation set in the early 2000s in St. Catharines, Ontario. High school is over, an ex-girlfriend is pregnant, and Troy Brinkman is losing control. Having just moved out of his parent's home, Troy enters a landscape of limitless moral entropy where everybody drinks copious amounts of alcohol, snorts mountains of cocaine, and swallows as many Ecstasy pills as they can get their hands on.

When he's not seething for his next high, Troy cruises parties, strip-clubs, and bars for action in a desperate attempt to avoid coming to terms with his best friend's attempted suicide. In this binge-life, Troy recognizes his impending doom and tries to renew feelings for his ex-girlfriend, Danielle, his sole through-line that connects Troy to who he was before his habits became him. It's this struggle which threatens to get the better of, consume, and ultimately destroy his dreams.

Ride is the millennial’s contemporary version of the classic 1960s counterculture novel, an authentic, unrelenting, and strangely exhilarating episodic group portrait of blasted lives. Listeners will catch familiar whiffs of the nihilism and loneliness in the darkest writings of Thompson, Bukowski, and Jack Kerouac in Lafleche’s gritty "sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll" world of excess, self-gratification, and black comedy.

©2020 Andrew Lafleche (P)2020 Andrew Lafleche

Critic reviews

"Andrew Lafleche's Ride, like a sharp new switchblade, has a dangerous weight to it. Troy is high risk, with sex, drugs, and crime, and he's giving his life the finger. Ride is highway speed and echoes Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting." (Gerald Arthur Moore, author of Shatter the Glass)

“Lafleche weaves a counterculture of loathing that mirrors a Hunter S.Thompson circus party. This is a bush party in the heart of the city and in the heart of Troy. The question is…will he survive?” (Keith Inman, author of The War Poems)