Black Dog by Erica Kent

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Black Dog by Erica Kent

The throes of addiction, the anxieties and traumas that are both causes and symptoms and the resulting sobriety process; the experiences of substance abuse. These experiences are both played out in the streets, visible to the naked eye, but also in the unknown lives of coworkers, family members and friends. Addiction and its resulting traumas are not new human experiences, and thus humanity’s battle with them is ongoing. Our wealth of literature, music and television on the subject, however, continues to inform and explore the subject.

Erica Kent’s debut novel, Black Dog, adds to this trove of literature with a tale of a young woman’s journey through addiction. The novel feels deeply personal, written choppily, like a personal diary. Dialogue punches through some of the intensely self-reflective writing but nonetheless serves as merely a buffer to its stream of consciousness style. The numerous references to current events of the 1980s and to rock artists from Led Zeppelin to Neil Young add to the novel's personal tone.

Starting from the perspective of an 11-year-old girl, the book lacks a change in dialogue between the 11-year-old narrator and her young friends and her young adult self at the finish. Thus, the young characters’ dialogue seems far-fetched and adult in content. The book, nonetheless, is powerfully written in its simplicity, painful in its emotion and prescient in its content. Told through the eyes of a woman embattled with addiction and emerging from it, it is a story, most of all, of hope.

Get Black Dog on Amazon here.

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