Stuck Forever in the Throat of Society

A quirky writer for a pulp magazine publisher, Stanley is on annual leave when he meets up with Dylan — his editor and friend — at a city pub. As Dylan nods off, wasted on heroin, Stanley enthuses about his new toy; a can of illegal pepper-spray, which he dubs ‘Mike Tyson in a can’. During a visit to the men’s room, he encounters an old antagonist, who he furtively sprays and gleefully watches fail. Thereafter, Stanley spends the remainder of his leave straying into bizarre and sometimes dangerous situations. He ruins his friend Troy’s life when, as a joke, he hands a random girl a defective condom in a nightclub. While doing Dylan a favour, he unwittingly conveys a stash of pure heroin, which he samples, thinking it to be cocaine. As a consequence he seemingly causes the death of an ex-prisoner he meets on a train and who decides that he is to become Stan’s new roommate. Meanwhile, a mystery nuisance caller has started causing Stanley some mild distress with repeated crank calls to his mobile. Glumly back at work, Stanley takes a Hitler doll purchased on company time along to a dinner, where he raises the ire of Ruby Hamblett, a spokeswoman for everything youth-oriented and politically correct. Things rapidly unravel as Ruby convinces Australia that Stanley is in fact a Nazi. He loses his job, his flat, and ends up living in a rooming house. With all that happens to him, it’s hard to know whether Stan is a victim of circumstance, or is receiving his karmic desserts. When he eventually goes on a drug fuelled evening of mayhem with Dylan’s lunatic flatmate, he learns that Ruby Hamblett isn’t the only architect of his downfall, but that treachery is afoot. Will he eventually come out tops, or is everything Stan touches doomed to defeat? And who IS that making those weird calls?