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Vicious Spring
Doing drugs to escape boredom and strengthen her bond with her marijuana-smoking father, high-school student Christy turns to her strip-club bouncer boyfriend when things at home deteriorate and takes a job as a lap dancer. A first novel. Reprint. 30,000 first printing.
- GenresFiction
192 pages, Paperback
First published April 24, 2003
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
January 2, 2018
A gritty, uncomfortable journey down all the wrong paths. While I know that the main character was often numbed by drugs, it was a very emotionless read, and when an author is delving into such raw grit without emotion, it comes across as a cheap attempt for shock factors. There was no character development (except perhaps negatively), no consequences for the worse characters, and no defined ending. It was a quick read, but I can't say that I learned anything or took anything away with me from reading this novel.
December 17, 2012
So from mainstream to subversion and this works very well.
The book is told in three sections - each with a different name of the main protagnist - Christy, Sugar and Veronica.
Christy is a 18 year old student on her last day at school, tripping out on acid at the family table.
She is thinking of the future - a job is a shop or working as a stripper at her boyfriends club, where she metamorphes into Sugar after surviving a car crash that kills her sister.
Sugar gets the attention of her other sisters husband who forms an obsession with her.
Can't quite remember how she turns into veronica or indeed how the book ends but there is no real story here.
Thats not the point. there is humour, truth and beauty and the advocation of a hedonistic lifestyle.
Works really well.
The book is told in three sections - each with a different name of the main protagnist - Christy, Sugar and Veronica.
Christy is a 18 year old student on her last day at school, tripping out on acid at the family table.
She is thinking of the future - a job is a shop or working as a stripper at her boyfriends club, where she metamorphes into Sugar after surviving a car crash that kills her sister.
Sugar gets the attention of her other sisters husband who forms an obsession with her.
Can't quite remember how she turns into veronica or indeed how the book ends but there is no real story here.
Thats not the point. there is humour, truth and beauty and the advocation of a hedonistic lifestyle.
Works really well.
May 5, 2024
Quick and wild ride
July 22, 2009
What a F***** up story! Every second kept me wanting more. Hampton-Jones knows how to wrap you up in the drug-addicted, dance club stripping, family abandoning life of a nineteen-year-old!!! This was almost a complete home run (I hated the ending), and as good as it was, this authors only piece. That, aside from the ending, is my only disappointment.
July 2, 2007
The premise of this book had great promise; however, it reads more like an outline or a sketch of what could have been a great novel. There are huge plot holes and barely any character development whatsoever.
April 9, 2023
A gritty, stark, and captivating quick read. No matter how unsettling, I kept wanting to turn the page. However, do I wish there was more to it? Absolutely. Do I regret reading it? Not at all.
April 13, 2023
Great hook: dropping acid during the last day of school. The tone is light and authentic without being too confusing to a straight-edge. Subtly navel-gazey and gorgeous, whacky like a teen dream. Especially the immediate scene where someone writes SLUT on her locker in purple nail polish so her sister skateboards in to set the word aflame, sparking the sprinklers. The girls in her fam are religious, but not her dad. In secret, the dad and she smoke weed in the bathroom and talk way too grossly about sex. It’s so nonchalant but sounds like it’ll foreshadow incest. I don’t think it will culminate in that, it’s just that looming fake-Christian creep factor. It doesn’t help that her BF is 33, a strip club bouncer, who only looks at Penthouse mags when they f.
This is what I wanted Tea Hacic’s A Cigarette Lit Backwards to be. Maybe it’s not as punk rock or as easy a read (here, an editor could come in and clarify when the card playing and sexdolling starts), but it’s a deeper first-person POV. The events are a mix of average and eye-widening like clerking at Dillards but then doing crystal meth and hooking up w/ a beach bum visiting from FL. The setting is 90s Nashville, TN, vs Greensboroo, NC, so pretty similar there but surprisingly more relatable in its suburban upbringing. Yet this MC has more confidence and agency than most. Not a ton, but remarkable for a teen “sinner.”
Before a fourth in, we have a genuine surprise. A third in, we actually see that the dad jacks off with a young peeping Tom, repeating what his daughter said about her silk-bondage escapades. Undercutting the more taboo seediness is the MC seducing her way into living with the closest thing she has to a BF. She either doesn’t know or care the BF is a loser because she’s also not well-off and super casual about sex in any form, so even joins in on antics w/ his stripper coworkers. Always high on a different substance, she floats through manure-fresh adulthood. She even becomes a stripper named Sugar to live on her own, always wanting pushback from her family and BF that never comes.
There’s always a masked sadness when she sees worn-out moms and scarred wrists and loveless men. It’s always an attribution to some impersonal childhood memory that gets the tears to bud—like remembering Dumbo’s pouty face. She cuts her hair and dyes it black, becoming a girl too numb to care about dead or neglectful loved ones. Too cold and coke-pow(d)ered to even care about lap-dancing her sad sister’s husband. The older the MC gets, the more she’s also like how I wish the one from Elle Nash’s Animals Eat Each Other was: in more diverse situations, with more emotional range, and expressing less blunt prose. The end is about as vague but less abrupt—and I wish the boy who has a crush on her reappeared instead of being trapped in chapter one. Maybe there are too many flight metaphors but there was enough of a circular plot to determine the end once the pages stop. Will definitely be reading her second book and wishing she wrote more.
This is what I wanted Tea Hacic’s A Cigarette Lit Backwards to be. Maybe it’s not as punk rock or as easy a read (here, an editor could come in and clarify when the card playing and sexdolling starts), but it’s a deeper first-person POV. The events are a mix of average and eye-widening like clerking at Dillards but then doing crystal meth and hooking up w/ a beach bum visiting from FL. The setting is 90s Nashville, TN, vs Greensboroo, NC, so pretty similar there but surprisingly more relatable in its suburban upbringing. Yet this MC has more confidence and agency than most. Not a ton, but remarkable for a teen “sinner.”
Before a fourth in, we have a genuine surprise. A third in, we actually see that the dad jacks off with a young peeping Tom, repeating what his daughter said about her silk-bondage escapades. Undercutting the more taboo seediness is the MC seducing her way into living with the closest thing she has to a BF. She either doesn’t know or care the BF is a loser because she’s also not well-off and super casual about sex in any form, so even joins in on antics w/ his stripper coworkers. Always high on a different substance, she floats through manure-fresh adulthood. She even becomes a stripper named Sugar to live on her own, always wanting pushback from her family and BF that never comes.
There’s always a masked sadness when she sees worn-out moms and scarred wrists and loveless men. It’s always an attribution to some impersonal childhood memory that gets the tears to bud—like remembering Dumbo’s pouty face. She cuts her hair and dyes it black, becoming a girl too numb to care about dead or neglectful loved ones. Too cold and coke-pow(d)ered to even care about lap-dancing her sad sister’s husband. The older the MC gets, the more she’s also like how I wish the one from Elle Nash’s Animals Eat Each Other was: in more diverse situations, with more emotional range, and expressing less blunt prose. The end is about as vague but less abrupt—and I wish the boy who has a crush on her reappeared instead of being trapped in chapter one. Maybe there are too many flight metaphors but there was enough of a circular plot to determine the end once the pages stop. Will definitely be reading her second book and wishing she wrote more.
February 8, 2021
Life and times of striptease...
Nothing much happens really. Except for the death of her sister, Lizzy. She must be living a boring life in suburbs. So, Christy chose striptease to make money. Didn’t need to destroy her head with coke though. But, it’s the only way to stay and feel alive, even though she’s no run-of-the-mill wimpy little Disneyesque girl. Not by a long shot. The ending was...hmmm. She probably won’t change much. Still, this book kept this reader’s interest.
Nothing much happens really. Except for the death of her sister, Lizzy. She must be living a boring life in suburbs. So, Christy chose striptease to make money. Didn’t need to destroy her head with coke though. But, it’s the only way to stay and feel alive, even though she’s no run-of-the-mill wimpy little Disneyesque girl. Not by a long shot. The ending was...hmmm. She probably won’t change much. Still, this book kept this reader’s interest.
June 17, 2010
this book was given to me as a gift. i probably wouldn't have read it otherwise. it may not be what i would consider a classic but i enjoyed it. i read it sprawled out on my bed, listening to loud music. in the end, i think my content mood had a lot to do with how i feel about this.
i might have liked it more but the ending seemed abrupt and unfinished to me.
all the characters are a bit on the extreme side which makes the struggles of the main character seem not as dramatic as they would otherwise. things, that as a woman, would be normally shocking or even disgusting came across as common place. it was a frustrating read for me because of that. that said the main character truly grew on me and i read to the end, hoping she would make it through alright.
[but did she? the ending just left me hanging. i felt ripped off, frankly.:]
i might have liked it more but the ending seemed abrupt and unfinished to me.
all the characters are a bit on the extreme side which makes the struggles of the main character seem not as dramatic as they would otherwise. things, that as a woman, would be normally shocking or even disgusting came across as common place. it was a frustrating read for me because of that. that said the main character truly grew on me and i read to the end, hoping she would make it through alright.
[but did she? the ending just left me hanging. i felt ripped off, frankly.:]
August 8, 2012
So, I think the total amount of times that I've read this book must exceed seven or so, by now. I remember every word, every sensation, every nuance of our main character to the "T." I feel as if I have lived inside her bones and have paraded her sorrow around town for all to mourn for me, while vicariously I have become numb in my own ineptitude toward emotion. I picked this up when I lived in Tennesee, supposedly Hollis Hampton-Jones lived in Tennesee when she wrote it, and it is just pure filth. That kind of filth that gets inside your pores when you roll around in it, pretending you're a pig in shit or something. You might have to be on acid to enjoy this book. You might have to be a 16 year-old girl lost in her own skin. Or you might just have to be an individual... Surprise, surprise.
November 17, 2007
A gritty raw story that leaves you wondering if there will ever be a happy ending for the character. The story takes place in a very surreal world of a girl who is adrift in the world through a haze of drugs, alcohol, grief and sex. The pacing is extremely fast pace; like most downward spirals are and I liked that about the story.
Was there a plot? I'm thinking that this was more of a snapshot into someone's life, than a complete story, and we are left wondering will she go back dancing for her brother-in-law or will Jesus finally be welcomed into her heart?
I want to give it 3 1/2 stars because I liked the story but I am not sure if it was truly a complete one.
Was there a plot? I'm thinking that this was more of a snapshot into someone's life, than a complete story, and we are left wondering will she go back dancing for her brother-in-law or will Jesus finally be welcomed into her heart?
I want to give it 3 1/2 stars because I liked the story but I am not sure if it was truly a complete one.
December 22, 2013
I wanted so much more from this main character, but it seemed like she was just stuck being this one dimensional person. It's a coming of age story, but somehow the first person narrative left our main character very predictable. The secondary characters seemed far more interesting than the one we were given unfortunately. And although there were some intriguing quotes, there was nothing to really add to them later on. The whole last section of the book just left me thinking, "So what..." Apparently, I stopped caring about her in the middle somewhere without realizing it until I nearly finished the book.
November 16, 2011
Christy is an amoral, apathetic, drug-pushing stripper, searching for some sort of tangible guidepost to show her what's meaningful and right. Vicious Spring depicts her graphic and tragic search for that meaning. The book serves as an incredibly realistic allegory of modernity's erasure of any semblance of "real." Hampton-Jones has put together a pitch-perfect portrayal of what goes wrong when relationships lose meaning, society decays, and sex is cheap. Christy's final realization is hopeful and spot-on: "I'm at least glad to know that vivid can be real." A solid novel.
December 27, 2013
I read this book about 6 years ago and it still stick with me today.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews