Author of the week: Jerry Stahl

last updated 8 January 2015

Novelist Jerry Stahl got some crazy ideas in his head while taking doctor-prescribed drugs, said Joseph Lapin in the Los Angeles Times. Neither drug use nor wild flights of imagination are anything new for the 59-year-old novelist, screenwriter, and former heroin addict, but his latest novel breaks fresh ground. In Happy Mutant Baby Pills, the protagonist and his Goth-girl lover ingest a cocktail of FDA-approved drugs in a bid to conceive a mutant baby and thus sound an alarm about the hazards of trusting Big Pharma and its corporate ilk. Stahl says the tale was inspired by a warning he was given after recently enlisting in a trial drug program. “I was told, ‘You can’t touch a pregnant woman,’” he says. “‘If your wife so much as touches your sweat while you’re on these pills, your baby is going to be born polka-dotted with tricycle arms.’”

Fortunately, Stahl’s own 18-month-old daughter was born healthy, said Larry Charles in Salon.com. And that’s just one reason that Stahl today considers himself incredibly lucky. “Strange things happen when you don’t die young, like ending up grateful,” he says. “Not because things are always good—but because you know how bad they can be.” Readers curious about Stahl’s dark times can find them in his 1995 addiction memoir, Permanent Midnight. Today, he credits the trial drug with curing him of the hepatitis C he contracted from past needle use, but he still isn’t willing to be quiet about the poisons that big business has introduced into our lives. “The cure,” he says, “is just a more benevolent disease.”