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For a group entitled "Shade of the Night," there are few books I can think of that run the gamut of darkness in the manner this one does. For starters, the title of the book itself is a double entendre -- there's "cottonmouth" in the sense of when a person is high, and then there's "the cottonmouth," also known as water moccasin, a poisonous snake with hollow fangs, like hypodermic needles.
It should come as no surprise that addiction is one of the topics addressed in this book, but that's far from the extent...the compendium includes both short stories/poetic prose and "spoken word text," opening with a tale about tryst in a Goth club gone awry, and exploring the topics of loss (friends, lovers, innocence) and longing thereafter -- i.e., life's "venomous life bite."
