Kicking In

Narcotic euphoria meets the demands of everyday life in Richard Wirick’s brilliant new collection of interlocking stories. Whether depicting a Valium-fogged lawyer representing a car painter who cooked a client in his kiln, or revealing a Gulf War orderly’s drift in and out of morphine dreams during an aerial Medevac surgery, Wirick’s stories are rich with the social contexts in which sedation’s acolytes emerge, come forward to flourish, and then often violently explode or fade away. With a fine