Ten Storey Love Song

Spanning one dynamite paragraph, **Ten Storey Love Song** follows Bobby the Artist's rise to stardom and horrific drug psychosis, Johnnie's attempts to stop thieving and start pleasing Ellen in bed and Alan Blunt, a forty-year-old truck driver who spends a worrying amount of time patrolling the grounds of the local primary school.

Bobby - the so-called 'love child of Keith Haring and Basquiat', hoped up in a Middlesbrough tower block - works on his canvases under the influence of pills-on-toast, acid-on-crackers and Francis Bacon. When Bent Lewis, a famous art dealer and mover-shaker from that London appears, Bobby and friends are sent on a sweaty adventure of self-discovery, hedonism and violence involving a 2.5cm-head curved claw hammer.

A love song to a loveless Teesside, **Ten Storey Love Song** is a ferocious slab of concrete prose peppered with beauty and delivered with glorious abandon.