This is a story of the cast aside and the down-and-out, the forgotten and the ignored, the hopeless and the hated. Lives intersect, and death intrudes. There are no heroes, just people trying to make it through the day. A combination of noir fiction, tragicomedy, and tell-all realism, Beneath the Concrete Sky is a genre blending novel that tells the story of a directionless young man named Eric who gets caught up in the urban drug trade. He somehow manages to have multiple encounters with a misanthropic, homeless veteran named Scott, and despite the latter's antipathy towards social interaction, the two eventually develop an odd sort of friendship. Together they work out a way to extricate Eric from his desperate situation that nearly costs both of their lives, yet ultimately, offers little in the way of salvation. A very concise synopsis: This novel is about a young adult (this is NOT Young-Adult Literature) named Eric who gets arrested on a petty drug possession charge which ultimately leads to his mother finding out that he is gay. The mother is a born-again Christian who immediately disowns her son and kicks Eric out of the house. He ends up cycling in and out jail because he can't pay the fines associated with his first arrest, so in order to make money, starts as a drug-mule for one of the city's biggest narcotics dealers (the city is never named, but it's obviously Houston). He witnesses a couple of murders, is booted out of the apartment he was sharing with his boyfriend, and finally decides to kill himself. It's while he he is in the process of committing suicide that he runs into Scott, a heroin-addicted, homeless veteran. Scott is actually the narrator of the story, and he describes his multiple run ins with Eric and how he eventually decides to help him get out of the drug trade. Along the way, we get more of Scott's own backstory and how he ended up on the street. It tries to stay true to life, so it's not exactly a happy story, although there is a lot of humor in it. As they rarely ever are, not all problems are solved by the end of the book.
