Would you endure the torment of failure to experience the catharsis of peace? You can. Winner of the second-place award in Contemporary Fiction for the prestigious 2025 Digital Book Today Literary awards, and currently in development to be a major motion picture, the Down and out in Seattle and Tacoma book series showcases the best in gritty contemporary indie fiction with a punk rock and satirical take on mental health and drug addiction. Charming but flawed Jack was never "right," but that's a lot of what made him magnetic to others. His decades-long deterioration is chronicled in painful detail with a mix of dark humor, tragedy, and brutal self-awareness that is unlike any book you've ever read. Sharp, poetic, and deeply human, but not a feel-good story. It's a gut punch that is absolutely unforgettable. Author Christopher J. Stockwell's existential and absurdist masterpiece shows you a Seattle that is a medically-prescribed nightmare. It mirrors the best aspects of the alcohol-induced blackout that is Charles Bukowski's LA, and the blue-faced overdose that is Irvine Welsh's Edinburgh. The Complete Down and Out in Seattle and Tacoma Series takes you there and shows you the view you can only get from the gutter. Enjoy! "A gritty, heartfelt journey through the recent past." —Kirkus Reviews "An outstanding cautionary story about someone with opportunities and intelligence who never quite learned the lessons life tried to teach him. With a more than healthy dose of humor, the author paints a depressing picture of what life could be." —Elizabeth Connor, Reedsy Discovery "Drawing from his own experience with alcoholism, drug use, homelessness, and the counterculture, Stockwell takes the reader to places on the underside of society that few dare to tread as they follow Jack through the social services and criminal justice systems." —Reader's Entertainment Magazine "Through Jack, Stockwell acquaints the reader with lonely souls living on Seattle's streets and shows areas people often don't acknowledge in their day-to-day lives: a psychiatric hospital; a camp of unhoused folks living under the bridge of a freeway; a crack den; and the county jail." —South Sound Magazine The down and out books were a labor of love, all book are, or at least they should be. Somewhere between George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London and Jack Black's You Can't Win memoirs, the idea for a fictionalized version of the socioeconomically depressed and substance -filled world I grew up in was hatched. I wrote the book back in 2005, when I was still an EMT. In the interim years, I got married, had a family, went to law school, and generally became an adult.   Eventually, I picked up the dusty Word doc. that was then called A Complete and Uncut Guide to Total Debauchery in the Modern World, and I had another look at it. My first novel, The Antagonist's Handbook, published in 2002 was traditionally published to no fanfare whatsoever, and I was pretty disillusioned by the experience. That said, I kept writing all those years. My hard drive is a testament to this as it's packed with novels, short stories, essays, and random writings of one variety or another, none of which will likely ever see the light of day. One way or the other, the experience also sparked me to create Bland Coffee Publishing LLC. I'm a punk rock kid, and getting a book deal never seemed like it was my style anyway. Punk is DIY. Black Flag never made a record that they didn't release themselves on SST Records, and look what they've accomplished.   Like I said, I had other manuscripts, but this one seemed like it had potential. I'd written it when I was still close enough to relevant events, times, and places to sharply capture them, but in the nearly twenty-year period since I'd developed a more measured perspective and delivery. So, I stripped the manuscript down to the studs. I kept what was great, trashed what wasn't, and stitched together the raw unfiltered character of Jack (the product of my angry youth) and a more mature narrator (the product of my professional present), to advocate for my trainwreck of a protagonist. The narrator and Jack talk over one another, and I honestly believe they are simply two different versions of one person (what was, and what might have been). I'll let you decide which is which. Those sloppy interactions woven right into the body of paragraphs have been a point of criticism for people looking for a cleaner and more traditional English structure to the prose, but playing with structure or even discarding and breaking down English formalities is sort of the point of the prose in fiction. I'm a skateboarder kid, so sometimes I just change my mind about what trick I'm doing while in midair. That skater in me wants to push the boundary of what the fiction medium will allow, and try to invent something new, or at least innovate something old. The punk in me just likes to come into your house and start swingin' a basebal