<DIV><DIV><DIV><P><I>Hero of the Underground</I> is the riveting <I>New York Times</I> bestseller.</P><P>I wasn't afraid of death. </P><P>How could I be? I lived under death's shadow every day. When you swallow sixty Vicodin, twenty sleeping pills, drink a bottle of vodka, and still survive, a certain sense of invulnerability stays with you.</P><P>When you continually use drugs with the kind of reckless determination that I did, the limit to how much heroin or crack you can ingest is not defined by dollar amounts but by the amounts your body can withstand without experiencing a seizure or respiratory failure. . . . </P><P>I found myself contemplating death again. Only this time I wasn't going to leave it to chance. I was going to buy a gun, load the thing, place the barrel in my mouth, and blow my fucking brains out.</P><P>And all—</P><P>of my problems—</P><P>would be—</P><P>solved.</P><DIV>“Had Hunter Thompson been a football player instead of a fan, this is the book he'd have written. Flat-out, mash-your-face-in-the-dirt amazing.” —Jerry Stahl, author of <I>Permanent Midnight</I></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV>