Truth or Dare

In severe weather, five friends have blown themselves too high on dope to notice the news of floods in the area, mudslides, power outages, closed roads, and they head to a cabin near Lake Tahoe. It’s the Christmas holidays and an imminent New Year, after all, giving them plenty of reason to celebrate big. They’re all very close. These five have had wild times together. Their personal histories are intertwined. There are the usual resentments, envies, desires. A girl named Hickory is the most recent addition among them, and the sexual tension is piqued between her and some of the boys. All in, it’s a classic setup. It works well in this highly stylized debut by D. Foy.

Readers will wish they could grapple D. Foy in a game of Truth or Dare to hear about all of his inspirations and influences. Because that’s what the meat of this story is: a Truth or Dare game gone bad, in a remote cabin, in really bad weather with trees falling over. The story is fiction, but at this time and in this place there were indeed floods, massive landslides, levee failures. And the narrative form has evidently been influenced by many genres and styles. The form is inconsistent but only at times seems too much of a jumble. Moreover the form stands out because for the narrator it is less of a concern than the vision. It is clear that Made to Break pays homage to Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971). The friends agree that “Hunter S is our hero.” Later, Andrew tells us that all he has left from these days are his name, some clothes, and a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. To compare these two books, the form and prose are similar at times, in small ways like the prevalent ellipses and in big ways like the disorienting dreamlike sections such that the reader can not know whether what’s happening is real or not. But Made to Break is not a savage journey to the heart of the American dream in the way of drug-crazed Raoul Duke and his attorney. Made to Break fails to relentlessly pursue the drug experience and the decay of culture, but instead is concerned with identity, and honesty among friends and among lovers, and what are the consequences of failing to tell the truth. As evidenced in its title, it is concerned with fragility. At the end of the day, Made to Break is far more interested in the truth, less in the dare.

At times the story tries to be more of Fear and Loathing than it needs to be. The narrator Andrew names this part of it the Comedown: “In all our years, our lasting pride was standing off the Comedown.” And here he slips into some stream of consciousness prose to try to get at what it means for him to feel the pull of booze and drugs, with some lovely phrases like “the tone arm’s bouncing in Angie’s last groove.” At its most coherent it reads, “The Comedown could gouge our eyes and break our teeth, stab us and choke us and carve its name in our heads, but we’d only scream for more.” It’s a convincing rant on its own. But in the very next paragraph the urgency is undermined and redirected: “Something good and mean had Dinky all right, if not the Comedown then some other such piece of woe.” For all the attention it gets, the Comedown never succeeds at center stage.

The story’s structure is linear for the most part, so the reader is able to follow along from one event sequentially to the next. It takes only a few pages to get used to the word choices with which the story is narrated and the peculiar way the characters are speaking to each other. The opening is more stylized than other parts, but astonishingly the creativity is sustained. There is the...