Drug Use & Abuse – Page 65 – Trigger Warning Database

In a Holidaze by Christina Lauren

In a Holidaze by Christina Lauren

It’s the most wonderful time of the year…but not for Maelyn Jones. She’s living with her parents, hates her going-nowhere job, and has just made a romantic error of epic proportions.

But perhaps worst of all, this is the last Christmas Mae will be at her favorite place in the world—the snowy Utah cabin where she and her family have spent every holiday since she was born, along with two other beloved families. Mentally melting down as she drives away from the cabin for the final time, Mae throws out what she thinks is a simple plea to the universe: Please. Show me what will make me happy.

The next thing she knows, tires screech and metal collides, everything goes black. But when Mae gasps awake…she’s on an airplane bound for Utah, where she begins the same holiday all over again. With one hilarious disaster after another sending her back to the plane, Mae must figure out how to break free of the strange time loop—and finally get her true love under the mistletoe.

Goo d reads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Alcohol consumption
Recreational drug use
Car accident

Release by Patrick Ness

Release by Patrick Ness

It’s Saturday, it’s summer and, although he doesn’t know it yet, everything in Adam Thorn’s life is going to fall apart. Relationships will change, he’ll change, but maybe, just maybe, he’ll find freedom in the release.

Time is running out though, because way across town a ghost as risen from the lake. Searching, yearning, she leaves a trail of destruction in her wake…

Goo d reads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Homomisia
Victim blaming
Sexual assault
Substance addiction
Drug use & abuse
Graphic dismemberment
Murder
Strangulation
Drowning

Run by Kody Keplinger

Run by Kody Keplinger

Bo Dickinson is a girl with a wild reputation, a deadbeat dad, and an alcoholic mom. Everyone in town knows the Dickinsons are a bad lot, but Bo doesn’t care what anyone thinks.

Agnes Atwood has never stayed out past ten p.m., never gone on a date and never broken any of her parents’ overbearing rules. Rules that are meant to protect their legally-blind daughter, but Agnes isn’t quite sure what they are protecting her from.

Despite everything, Bo and Agnes become best friends. But when Bo shows up in the middle of the night, police sirens wailing in the distance, Agnes is faced with the biggest choice she’s ever had to make. Run, or stay?

Goo d reads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Slut shaming
Toxic friendships
Substance addiction
Drug use & abuse
Alcohol consumption

The Risk by Elle Kennedy

The Risk by Elle Kennedy

Everyone says I’m a bad girl. They’re only partly right—I don’t let fear rule me, and I certainly don’t care what people think. But I draw the line at sleeping with the enemy. As the daughter of Briar’s head hockey coach, I’d be vilified if I hooked up with a player from a rival team.

And that’s who Jake Connelly is. Harvard’s star forward is arrogant, annoying, and too attractive for his own good. But fate is cruel—I require his help to secure a much-coveted internship, and the sexy jerk isn’t making it easy for me.

I need Connelly to be my fake boyfriend. For every fake date, he wants a real one… Read more.

Goo d reads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Ableism & ableist language
Misogyny
Substance addiction
Panic attack
Drug abuse
Teen pregnancy recounted
Miscarriage recounted
Abortion mentioned

Going Bovine by Libba Bray

Going Bovine by Libba Bray

All 16-year-old Cameron wants is to get through high school—and life in general—with a minimum of effort. It’s not a lot to ask. But that’s before he’s given some bad news: he’s sick and he’s going to die. Which totally sucks. Hope arrives in the winged form of Dulcie, a loopy punk angel/possible hallucination with a bad sugar habit. She tells Cam there is a cure—if he’s willing to go in search of it. With the help of a death-obsessed, video-gaming dwarf and a yard gnome, Cam sets off on the mother of all road trips through a twisted America into the heart of what matters most.

Goo d reads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Recreational drug use
Fire
Physical assault
Gun violence

The Dinner by Herman Koch

The Dinner by Herman Koch

A summer’s evening in Amsterdam and two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant. Between mouthfuls of food and over the delicate scraping of cutlery, the conversation remains a gentle hum of politeness – the banality of work, the triviality of holidays. But the empty words hide a terrible conflict and, with every new course, the knives are being sharpened.

Each couple has a fifteen-year-old son. Together, the boys have committed a horrifying act, caught on camera; despite a police manhunt, the boys remain unidentified – by everyone except their parents.

Goo d reads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Homomisia
Misogyny
Mental illness
Drug use
Miscarriage
Chronic illness
Murder

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.

With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.

Goo d reads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Racism & racial slurs
Homomisia, including internalised homomisia & homomisic slurs
Rape recounted
Parental abuse
Domestic abuse mentioned
Substance addiction
Recreational drug use & abuse
Cancer
Death of a grandparent
Vietnam War discussed
Animal abuse
Bullying

The Dark Half by Stephen King

The Dark Half by Stephen King

Thad Beaumont is a writer, and for a dozen years he has secretly published violent bestsellers under the name of George Stark. But Thad is a healthier and happier man now, the father of infant twins, and starting to write as himself again. He no longer needs George Stark and so, with nationwide publicity, the pseudonym is retired. But George Stark won’t go willingly.

And now Thad would like to say he is innocent. He’d like to say he has nothing to do with the twisted imagination that produced his bestselling novels. He’d like to say he has nothing to do with the series of monstrous murders that keep coming closer to his home. But how can Thad deny the ultimate embodiment of evil that goes by the name he gave it—and signs its crimes with Thad’s bloody fingerprints?

Goo d reads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Nightmares
Alcoholism & alcohol abuse
Smoking
Surgery recounted
Murder
Animal attack (birds)

Different Seasons by Stephen King

Different Seasons by Stephen King

Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption–the most satisfying tale of unjust imprisonment and offbeat escape since The Count of Monte Cristo.

Apt Pupil–a golden California schoolboy and an old man whose hideous past he uncovers enter into a fateful and chilling mutual parasitism.

The Body–four rambunctious young boys venture into the Maine woods and in sunlight and thunder find life, death, and intimations of their own mortality.

The Breathing Method–a tale told in a strange club about a woman determined to give birth no matter what.

Goo d reads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Rape, including prison rape
Cheating
Alcohol consumption
Recreational drug use
Dismemberment
Gun violence
Knife violence & stabbing
Animal abuse

All Of My Friends Are Rich by Michael Sarais

All Of My Friends Are Rich by Michael Sarais

Orphan Leo Cotton has finally built a family, but the advent of bipolar depression wakes him from this dreamlife to reveal dark truths about the man he’d married.

One year later, Leo is lost. Embarrassed by a dead-end job that barely pays the bills, he can’t help but notice that those around him are all enjoying success. When his closest friend, Sara, asks him to be her best man, Leo reaches the last straw: how can he possibly afford these lavish festivities on his wages? A Grindr chance encounter reveals that a shortcut to riches does exist . . . but in the end, this reckless route may cost him the loved-ones he aims to impress and welcome terrible danger . . .

Leo’s trip will take him afar, but answers lie only within.

Goo d reads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Sex work
Depression
Suicidal ideation
Alcohol consumption & abuse
Drug use
Death of a parent recounted