Drug Use & Abuse – Page 69 – Trigger Warning Database

Tales of the Madman Underground by John Barnes

Tales of the Madman Underground by John Barnes

September 1973: The beginning of Karl Shoemaker’s senior year in stifling Lightsburg, Ohio. For years, Karl’s been part of “the Madman Underground”- kids forced to attend group therapy during school. Karl has decided that he is going to get out of the Madman Underground for good. He is going to act-and be-Normal. But Normal, of course, is relative. Karl has two after-school jobs, one dead father, one seriously unhinged drunk mother . . . and a huge attitude. Welcome to a gritty, uncensored rollercoaster ride, narrated by the singular Karl Shoemaker.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Homomisia & homomisic slurs
Racism & racial slurs
Hate crimes
Child sexual abuse
Underage sex work
Physical & verbal abuse
Alcoholism
Alcohol consumption & abuse
Recreational drug use
Medical treatment
Needles
Physical assault
Animal death & death of a pet
Animal abuse

The Making of Dr. Truelove by Derrick Barnes

The Making of Dr. Truelove by Derrick Barnes

When St. Ivory Academy, a historically white wizarding Diego is a 16-year-old boy with a problem. When he breaks up with the girl he loves due to his insecurities, he is crushed. Will he ever win Roxy back? On the trusty advice of his best friend, Diego invents an alter ego known as Dr. Truelove, a sex and relationship e-columnist who knows how to treat the ladies.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Queermisia
Alcohol consumption
Recreational drug use
Physical assault

Babayaga by Toby Barlow

Babayaga by Toby Barlow

Will is a young American ad executive in Paris. Except his agency is a front for the CIA. It’s 1959 and the cold war is going strong. But Will doesn’t think he’s a warrior—he’s just a good-hearted Detroit ad guy who can’t seem to figure out Parisian girls.

Zoya is a beautiful young woman wandering “les boulevards, “sad-eyed, coming off a bad breakup. In fact, she impaled her ex on a spike. Zoya, it turns out, has been a beautiful young woman for hundreds of years; she and her far more traditionally witchy-looking companion, Elga, have been thriving unnoticed in the bloody froth of Europe’s wars… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Racism & racial slurs
Antiziganism (g slur)
Slut shaming
Rape
Cheating
Recreational drug use
Overdose
Murder
Infantcide

Rule of the Bone by Russell Banks

Rule of the Bone by Russell Banks

When we first meet him, Chappie is a punked-out teenager living with his mother and abusive stepfather in an upstate New York trailer park. During this time, he slips into drugs and petty crime. Rejected by his parents, out of school and in trouble with the police, he claims for himself a new identity as a permanent outsider; he gets a crossed-bones tattoo on his arm, and takes the name “Bone.”

He finds dangerous refuge with a group of biker-thieves, and then hides in the boarded-up summer house of a professor and his wife. He finally settles in an abandoned schoolbus with Rose, a child he rescues from a fast-talking pedophile. There Bone meets I-Man, an exiled Rastafarian, and together they begin a second adventure that takes the reader from Middle America to the ganja-growing mountains of Jamaica. It is an amazing journey of self-discovery through a world of magic, violence, betrayal and redemption.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Attempted suicide
Recreational drug use & abuse

White Lines by Armand Baltazar

White Lines by Armand Baltazar

In 1980s New York City, seventeen-year-old Caitlin tries to overcome her mother’s abuse and father’s abandonment by losing herself in nights of clubbing and drugs, followed by days of stumbling aimlessly through school.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Parental abandonment
Physical parental abuse recounted
Adult-minor relationship mentioned
Substance addiction
Attempted suicide by overdose mentioned
Alcohol consumption
Graphic drug use & abuse

Diego and the Rangers of the Vastlantic by Armand Baltazar

Timeless: Diego and the Rangers of the Vastlantic by Armand Baltazar

The world did not end. At least not permanently. The Time Collision came from beyond the stars, a cosmic event that fractured time and space, tearing apart the earth and reshaping it into something entirely new. This is the world Diego Ribera was born into. The past, present, and future coexisting together. Timeless.

In New Chicago, Diego’s middle school hallways buzz with kids from all eras of history and from cultures all over the world. The pieces do not always fit together neatly, but this is the world he loves. There are those, however, who do not share his affection… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Alcohol consumption
Smoking mentioned
Murder of a brother mentioned
Sword violence
Gun violence
Kidnapping
Near-drowning incident
War themes & battle scenes

The Lore of Prometheus by Graham Austin-King

The Lore of Prometheus by Graham Austin-King

John Carver has three rules: Don’t drink in the daytime, don’t gamble when the luck has gone, and don’t talk to the dead people who come to visit.

It has been almost five years since the incident in Kabul. Since the magic stirred within him and the stories began. Fleeing the army, running from the whispers, the guilt, and the fear he was losing his mind, Carver fell into addiction, dragging himself through life one day at a time.

Desperation has pulled him back to Afghanistan, back to the heat, the dust, and the truth he worked so hard to avoid. But there are others, obsessed with power and forbidden magics… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
Drugging
Hallucinations
Medical experimentation
Blood & gore depiction
Gun violence
Torture
Immolation
Kidnapping

The Strange Fascinations of Noah Hypnotik by David Arnold

The Strange Fascinations of Noah Hypnotik by David Arnold

This is Noah Oakman → sixteen, Bowie believer, concise historian, disillusioned swimmer, son, brother, friend.

Then Noah → gets hypnotized.

Now Noah → sees changes: his mother has a scar on her face that wasn’t there before; his old dog, who once walked with a limp, is suddenly lithe; his best friend, a lifelong DC Comics disciple, now rotates in the Marvel universe. Subtle behaviors, bits of history, plans for the future–everything in Noah’s world has been rewritten. Everything except his Strange Fascinations . . .

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Homomisia
Alcohol consumption
Recreational drug use mentioned
Coma

Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett

Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett

One morning, Jessa-Lynn Morton walks into the family taxidermy shop to find that her father has committed suicide, right there on one of the metal tables. Shocked and grieving, Jessa steps up to manage the failing business, while the rest of the Morton family crumbles. Her mother starts sneaking into the shop to make aggressively lewd art with the taxidermied animals. Her brother Milo withdraws, struggling to function. And Brynn, Milo’s wife—and the only person Jessa’s ever been in love with—walks out without a word. As Jessa seeks out less-than-legal ways of generating income, her mother’s art escalates—picture a figure of her dead husband and a stuffed buffalo in an uncomfortably sexual pose—and the Mortons reach a tipping point. For the first time, Jessa has no choice but to learn who these people truly are, and ultimately how she fits alongside them.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Child abuse & neglect
Depression
Self harm
Alcohol abuse
Drug abuse
Grief & loss depiction
Death of a father from suicide
Graphic animal death

We Are All That’s Left by Carrie Arcos

We Are All That’s Left by Carrie Arcos

Zara and her mother, Nadja, have a strained relationship. Nadja just doesn’t understand Zara’s creative passion for, and self-expression through, photography. And Zara doesn’t know how to reach beyond their differences and connect to a closed-off mother who refuses to speak about her past in Bosnia. But when a bomb explodes as they’re shopping in their local farmers’ market in Rhode Island, Zara is left with PTSD–and her mother is left in a coma. Without the opportunity to get to know her mother, Zara is left with questions–not just about her mother, but about faith, religion, history, and her own path forward.

As Zara tries to sort through her confusion, she meets Joseph, whose grandmother is also in the hospital, and whose exploration of religion and philosophy offer comfort and insight into Zara’s own line of thinking.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger & Content Warnings:

Attempted rape
Suicidal ideation
Alcohol consumption
SMoking
Blood & physical injury depiction
Murder
Gun violence
Explosions
Physical assault
Bosnian War