It's A Long Way Down tells the story of David Emmeret Smith, a successful actor who, on the cusp of the biggest night of his life, acts on one impulsive decision after another, beginning a downward spiral that threatens everything he holds dear. What follows from this is a hedonist's love affair with drugs, depravity and destruction and the realization that it wasn't so far down after all.
"A good addict isn't built overnight.
He isn't built in a week, or two weeks, or a month.
An addict, much like a well-deserved discipline, a martial art, a painting, or a poem, takes time to build-and a fair bit of money-and David had as much of either of those as any junkie ever had.
However, within him still remained a last quality that, in order to be a full-fledged card carrying member of team tar, to wear, not his heart on his sleeve, but junk in his veins, had to be expunged: his pride.
A junkie's pride-once the junk has embedded itself into the cellular structure, once it has forced itself into every nodule and nook and nether region, once it is a necessary part of the human biome, a cellular symbiosis, a partnership baked in the intertwining facets of pleasure and pain, when you would do anything, everything, for one more taste, one stretched dollar, a soul for a spoon, a prick for a prick-is always the last to go, the final stage in a metamorphosis that no man should undertake.
David, naive to the state of his body's new chemical makeup, had to learn this the hard way. He had, as the proud do, decided that he wasn't a man who bent the knee to any drug. He had to show himself that every decision he made was a conscious one, that he had a will of his own, was a man with agency.
But, sooner or later, pride leaves the body, and what is left is the junk and a man must come to terms with a solitary truth: knees were made to bend."
Find out in the debut novel by Ian Canon.
About the Author: Ian Canon is a Canadian novelist, freelance writer, and poet working in digital marketing with an obsession for all forms of storytelling. He is primarily interested in stories that incorporate thematic elements of existence, death, love, art, technology, and the mundane. His personal interests include politics, film (P.T. Anderson, Charlie Kaufman, Stanley Kubrick), poetry (Rudyard Kipling, Allen Ginsberg, E.E. Cummings), and fiction (Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon, John Williams, David Foster Wallace, George Orwell). He received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Alberta in Philosophy and English. His body of work includes... Before Oblivion - A collaboration between artist Jai Tanninen and poet Ian Canon. It's A Long Way Down - Ian Canon's debut novel.
