GUTGAA SPP #15 - The Scum Diary

The Scum Diary
Adult Literary Fiction
73,500

Query:

The name Sanders has become an immediate conversation-ender for Sam Karr.  While her friends realize that something has gone amiss, Sam refuses to talk about it.  Or even think about it.  Besides, she has other issues to deal with.  These issues being her dysfunctional friends.

After a horrific New Year’s Eve that Sam immediately attempts to strike from her memory, she receives a desperate phone call from her sister.  Their friend Dom has snorted one too many lines of coke and isn’t handling it well.

Typical.

Sam is called on for crisis after crisis, including Abe’s DUI, Matt’s drug-induced mental breakdown, and Cody’s womanizing that leads to him drunkenly driving through the dining room of a Wendy’s.  But when she comes home to the news that Matt has tried to kill himself, she finally begins to crack.  Her past that she's been avoiding begins to bubble up to the surface, a past that may suggest she’s not so far removed from their world as she seems to think.

THE SCUM DIARY is as much a novel about human perception and judgment, as it is a portrait of the lives of those being judged, The Rum Diary meets The Perks of Being a Wallflower.  Amidst drunken bar fights and one night stands, what appear a handful of tattered, miserable dregs may be something more as their stories unfold and delve into darker and heavier issues- addiction, death, and the strangest of them all, friendship.

First 150 Words:

There’s something about an Ohio winter, the cold that not only blankets the Midwestern terrain in a soft white, but a cold so deep and dry and dead that it penetrates directly to the bone, attaching itself there, chilling the spine and frosting the heart.  Within this barren, lifeless landscape that carries no sympathy in its merciless winds lies a different sort of underworld.

This was their world.

The cold night air stung as I sprinted to my car in the dirt-stained snow, avoiding the ice-covered sidewalks littered with empty beer cans and trash.  The skin beneath my eyes was raw and burnt in the cold wind.  I took deep, slow breaths trying not to think about the night’s events.  If I wouldn’t think, I wouldn’t feel.  And I liked not feeling. The problem with this was that I had never once been able to shut off my mind.  There had never been some sort of magic mute button to my thoughts.