LIBRARY LINE: Drug abuse in the Old West

In “Missy” by Chris Hannan, the West is at its wildest when Dol McQueen, a 19-year-old hooker with a weakness for laudanum, travels from San Francisco through the Sierra Nevadas, seeking her fortune, looking for good times and trying to dodge trouble on the way. Heading eastward against the westward expansion, Dol is accompanied by her fellow “flash-girls,” her alcoholic mother and her own addiction to Missy, as the liquid opium is called.

Along the route she encounters a thief with a cache of high grade opium he has stolen from a major crime figure in San Francisco. Seeing the heist as her future, she tracks the thief relentlessly, mere miles ahead of a soulless posse of children sent to track him down.  Dol’s relationship with her mother causes further complications, and the truth in it is made slippery by the alcohol and opium.  When Dol goes through unplanned drug withdrawal in the desert, she eventually gains clarity about herself and her mother, but never loses her feistiness or humor or ambition.

Hannan’s depictions of the littering of the west, goods discarded from wagons along the trails, is eerily fascinating, and he captures the tough lawlessness of communities that suddenly are formed around the wealth that the earth spews forth and then as quickly disbanded when the wealth has been picked clean. By the time you finish with “Missy,” you may feel hot and a little dirty under the collar, but it is worth the trip.

“The House at Midnight,” a gothic thriller by Lucie Whitehouse, is as cool and still as “Missy” is riotous and rambunctious.  When Lucas inherits the family estate, he invites his close university friends to spend as much time there as they can.  Lucas’s girlfriend, JoAnna, slowly begins to feel an uncomfortable undercurrent from a few of the group, but also apparently from the house itself.  At the house, people change and relationships are altered.  At times it seems unseen forces have a master plan for the house’s inhabitants ... but after all, it is just a house.  Darkly atmospheric and gripping, Whitehouse has successfully created a modern gothic lair for her hip, young characters.

These books, and more, can be found on the new book shelves at the Ottawa Library.

Heidi Van der Heuvel is a librarian with the Ottawa Library.