Stun

In the fictional Chicago suburb of New Lawn, a young woman grows up with a workaholic father and a dysfunctional mother who has a predilection for Stun—a prescription drug prone to abuse. Between Dad’s business trips and Mom’s affairs and overdoses, she grows self-reliant and introverted, possessed of an interior life possibly more interesting (and seemingly more safe) than the real one. Navigating the challenges of work, school, sexuality—and above all, her own feelings—she searches for her own place in the world. Until at last she finds that she, too, has a taste for Stun.

Stun is a masterpiece that lightly dances along the tightrope between prose and poetry, while also looking at the addictions society condemns, and the ones it condones. With echoes of Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, and a novel-in-fragments approach reminiscent of Ocean Vuong, it’s a sparkling debut from a fantastic new talent—Becky Wills.