Cain's Book

Blurb

Cain's Book is a 1960 novel by Scottish beat writer Alexander Trocchi. A roman a clef, it details the life of Joe Necchi, a heroin addict and writer, who is living and working on a scow on the Hudson River in New York.
The book alternates between Necchi/Trocchi's attempts to score and flashbacks to his experiences as a child in Glasgow, and later as a young man in London and Paris. It is also an account of what it means to be a junky and an outsider from society. On occasion it can descend into ranting about the hypocrisy and stupidity of drug prohibition and the general inequities of the world. It describes with an eye for detail the rituals of heroin, the cooking up and the search for a suitable vein.
It gets more and more fragmented as it draws to a close with Trocchi realizing that he is incapable of a maintaining a conventional narrative. In being consumed with his addiction, Trocchi strives to document his alienation and his desire to use his creativity against the existentialist fear of being washed away by history with no sign of his life remaining.
When I write I have trouble with my tenses. Where I was tomorrow is where I am today, where I would be yesterday.