Go Now

On the road with the Blank Generation, "Go Now" takes readers on a wild trip across the country and into the head of a down-on-his-luck punk musician. ""Go Now" is a vile, scabrous, unforgivable, and deserving of the widest possible audience".--William Gibson.

... guided by a ranging, meditative mind, the story becomes an emblem of how we live now. With candor the teller transforms blunders into the only shapely and reliably honorable offering that can be made of such materials: art. I was captive shortly after word one ... makes Beckett's despair seem chirpy. Billy's most sordid plunges are rendered in a slit-eyed dryness worthy of Burroughs, but Billy is kin to Kafka and Bartleby, as well Hell nails the autoerotic urgency of sexual hunger, our ability at the flick of a neuron to find everyone arousing, the landscape morphing into a mirror of our restlessness. -- Laurie Stone, The Nation

Capable of moments of profound personal insight and revelation as well as acts of profane indecency and sexual deviance, Hell's character both seduces and repels. Yet in the end Mud is Hell's greatest gift as a novelist. In the ambiguity of Mud's characterization lies the power of Hell's language. Only a writer as versatile as Hell could describe Mud's bout with heroin withdrawal with sympathy and pathos, then go on to make us despise his semi-conscious hero. Hell, like Mud, plays a great, bold game with the reader, proving himself as a writer with a vision that is not easy to shake off. -- BookPage

Hell's brilliant junkie novel, Go Now, is prison writing from the lockup of the head, but unlike the majority of addiction testimony, narrator Billy's sentences are hammered out of hard-won insights, snaking around your basic pillars of consciousness, loneliness, self-disgust, oblivion, and sex. -- The Village Voice

[S]harp, clear and hysterically funny. With a detached prose style that is both brutally honest and self-conscious, Hell can be frightfully insightful Forget Jim Carroll, Go Now is the real junkie rock 'n' roll literary masterpiece. -- James Marshall, High Times