In 1996, “Teenage Degenerate”’s author Scott Sterling was nineteen and lost in adulthood with a thankless job and a future without any promise. The book is Sterling’s firsthand account of shedding his addiction to dangerous drugs as a way of growing up. His rapid decline once in the clutches of crystal methamphetamine addiction is a horror show magnified to highlight all the worst aspects.

“Up to that point, I had avoided getting meth sores or ‘meth mites,’ associated with meth addicts. The sores usually occur from constant picking at a problem area, and that becomes larger and larger, and then usually spreads to other areas. The sores take longer to heal because meth restricts blood flow to the infected area. A few days before Thanksgiving, I got my first meth sore, it was on my forearm. It was small compared to others I had seen, so I considered myself lucky.”

In this book, young, misguided Scott experiments with crystal meth in dark, deserted parking lots all over the suburbs of Denver, Colorado, making and breaking deals among an ever changing smorgasbord of mutated outliers desperate for the next rush of chemicals. Inevitably, trusted family connections wither and atrophy in the wake of that synthetic storm of junk, leaving the author with hard cold facts mandating desperate realignment of his withered sensibilities. Teenage Degenerate is a deadpan recounting of the perilous and worsening path trod by its author in the experience and ultimate renunciation of addiction to manmade chemical “fixes,” which always fall short, narrating its author’s arduous effort to wrest back some semblance of normalcy and realness after hitting rock bottom.

Click the following link to read the review from Examiner.com of Teenage Degenerate.