A Catholic high school near Boston in 1985. A time of suicides, gymnasium humiliations, smoking for beginners, asthma attacks, and incendiary teenage infatuations. Infatuations with a girl (Allison), with a band (The Smiths) and with an album, Meat is Murder, that was so raw, so vivid and so melodic that you could cling to it like a lifeboat in a storm.

In this brilliant novella Joe Pernice tells the story of an asthmatic kid's discovery of Meat is Murder.

Here is a short exceropt:

One morning as I was jogging my way past the bronze plaque commemorating the...