Somewhere on the streets of New York's Lower East Side, gangsters fill getaway cars with gasoline, and somewhere someone is evicted. Somewhere a Brooks Brother and his banker shake hands. The sweatshops become lofts, and the streets become homes. The deals are made without greed, no, in this place the greed belongs to the city, and to life itself. In this God-forsaken corner of a city jungle, we're all in the crosshairs, every one of us — pop, pop, pop — and the sirens that no one else will stop to hear, call for us.”

Somewhere a siren calls for Crane King, the rogue hero of this shattering story about lives lived out of balance and moral compasses gone haywire. Crane is a drunk, Kimberly Anderson is a drunk, the Clara Bow of the cocktail set, Crane calls her. They storm through a love affair that is searingly painful, heartbreakingly funny, and brutally honest, a modern morality play of big lives and little deaths reeling toward its shocking conclusion.

Stephen Creagh Uys populates his debut novel with gritty characters from the streets of New York, pimps, bartenders and sharks, dope-heads, demons and dreamers — people we all see but are afraid to look at. The Last Generation of Chainsmokers heralds an exciting new writer whose prose pulsates with life and vigor and cuts to the core of the human condition.

When Crane King and Kimberly Anderson first meet in The Village Idiot, it is the middle of the day and both are drunk. The story of their besotted passion in a downward-spiraling world is at once tender — the exquisite pain of mad love — and menacing in its descent toward impending catastrophe.

Stephen Creagh Uys draws on shifting, often fragmentary points of view to tell the aching love story of a couple perfectly suited to each other, but not the world. They are Scott and Zelda caught in the crosshairs of Big Daddy-O Apple, a haywire existence with devastating consequences for all around them. 

Uys takes no prisoners in this taut, harrowing book that moves seamlessly from Madison Avenue to the holding pens of The Tombs. Lives lived minimally loom large on every page, with brilliant, often savage wordplay, from a streetwise and savvy observer of the city that never sleeps.