Cheap Wine offers a unique style of fiction, a slight of hand technique, and an unorthodox storytelling approach that combines irony, understatement, cultural commentary, and psychoanalytic theory; it brings forth comic illustrations of a perverse mind cursed by the ghastly 'Fiend Intemperance'. Like all of his work, Simmons places Cheap Wine in a world of polemics, in a world outside the realm of traditional thought. There are no explosions, no planet saving heroes, no cliche damsels in distress. When asked to describe his fiction in one sentence Simmons responded: it's not for children.