Dropping Out
Rory Langford is in a downward spiral. After losing his father to suicide, he is cut adrift from a family he has always been at odds with: an older sister who has never understood him, and a grieving mother who can’t even bear the sight of him.
In the wake of tragedy, he staggers from soulless university classrooms to the bar as he turns to spirits to drown his guilty conscience. But when he can no longer harbour a family secret that threatens to swallow him alive, he is plunged headfirst into a whiskey-fuelled existential crisis like no other. On the brink of total collapse, he finds himself fist-fighting frat boys, shitting on the floor of a drunk tank, sleeping in graveyards and encountering a cast of characters including a doomed ex-con, an old friend with a weird fixation on the writings of Karl Marx and a woman whose present reminds Rory too much of his past.
Equal parts punk rock paean and Shakespearean tragedy, Dropping Out is a blistering portrait of addiction and self-immolation.