Small Town Punk: a novel

Latch Key Kids-- Sarasota, Florida in 1982 is a dreary, seaside resort town from which the only escape seems to be accepting a corrupt existence. Buzz, a 17-year-old punk, can see no honest future ahead of him. “The anticipation of things is always better than what really happens,” he notes. He and his sister Sissy, along with their two friends Albino and Dave, spend their evenings working minimum-wage jobs at a fastfood outlet. They suffer going to high school with junior fascists. They wear second-hand clothes. They live in a second-hand world.

“I have a need for certain people to hate me. If those people don’t hate me, I feel like a failure,” Buzz says. “It’s sort of an affirmation of what I am not.” It’s a low life of fury and frustration, cheap alcohol, illicit drugs, and punk rock music.

Small Town Punk is a brutally funny romp through Reagan’s “Morning in America”.