Danny B

Danny B. is the latest novel from Tim Kinsella, based on a true story from the Pacific Northwest of addiction, dead bodies, misfits, and one guy trying to make sense of it all. Kinsella wrote the book with the blessing (and help) of his friend, the title character: Danny B… 

Danny didn’t feel at home at home (especially with a roommate who wouldn't stop building shit at 6 am), but the pinball arcade and the strip club welcomed him. 

It’s Portland, 2004, and with the fog of his mother’s unsolved murder years earlier still hanging over him, Danny joined Narcotics Anonymous. 

The motorcycle gang that ran this N. A. group got him a job as a first-call responder for the city morgue, requiring him to regularly walk in on the worst day of a stranger’s life. 

And so Danny is forced to navigate the increasingly-maddening choices of early recovery, the cosmic shifts that don't come when you expect them, the meetings where everyone's a bundle of unconscious reflexes trying to untangle their own shit, and the painful paradox of simultaneously being independent and being accountable to others.

Based on the true story of becoming oneself, Danny B. is an impressionistic drift that pauses to zoom in on minute particulars: cigarettes stolen from the dead, energy drinks at dawn, and the specific way streetlights flash across a face when you're driving through a de-peopled city during the dreaming hours.

This is a book written in sharp, stuttering fragments—covering grief and geography and what it means to outrun your past when your job is literally picking up corpses. You might even finally understand what it's like to be awake inside a dream, or at least what it costs to try.