By Geoff Rickly

Someone Who Isn’t Me is a languid cautionary tale that takes readers through the rollercoaster ride of addiction. There are scenes of scoring junk outside a place of employment in order to use at work, descriptions of how years of abuse can swallow your identify and blur reality, and depictions of the types of challenges faced on the road to salvation/sobreity.

This debut from Geoff Rickly navigates the full mental lifecycle of a hard drug user long after it’s taken a devastating toll on their inner psyche. Revealing diction takes readers on an intriguing odyssey of introspection, an exercise in self-exploration used to attempt to overcome the harrowing grips that opioid-based substances can place on a mind.

This novel is for those who want a raw read and wish to better understand all aspects of human nature. Specifically, what life is like being haunted by drug addiction in an unromantic, seemingly accurate portrayal that will feed curious minds. Fans of Burroughs’ works like Naked Lunch and other exposés that take creative approaches to writing about the effects of chemical dependency will find this to be a thrilling, modern day take. Not a single page is wasted throughout this semi-autobiographical text, turning the many hallucinatory passages about losing sight of yourself into something layered, vulnerable, and even beautiful:

My reflection listens carefully, worrying the corners of two folded-up hundred dollar bills in his jacket pocket, as he enters the freezer section. When my man reaches the frozen pizzas, he looks at my reflection in the glass of the freezer doors, and I wonder if he sees what I see: the reflection of my reflection, the ghost of my ghost, floating in the cold phosphor glare of the market hungry but unable to eat, thirsty but unable to drink.

At the core of this novel is an interesting exploration of using ibogaine, a real plant-based psychoactive compound leveraged by rehab clinics in Mexico, to help users introspectively dissect certain life events that are believed to be at the root of amplifying addictive behaviors. The goal is to finally face those issues head-on and hopefully, get clean. This allows the protagonist to have dream-like experiences—some seem to be completely real visions of actual occurrences while others are distorted realities—to help him work through what causes him to use, see how much he is cared for, and figure out how to navigate the next phase of his life while trying to stay sober.

Rating: 4/5