Richard Milward: Ten Storey Love Song

Spanning one torrential paragraph, Ten Storey Love Song follows Bobby the Artist's rise to stardom and decline into horrific drug psychosis, Johnnie's attempts to stop thieving and start pleasing Ellen in bed, and Alan Blunt, a forty-year-old container driver who spends a worrying amount of time patrolling the grounds of the local primary school. Bobby - the so-called 'love-child of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat', holed up in a Middlesbrough tower block - works on his canvases under the influence of pills-on-toast, dirt-cheap cider and dream pop. When Bent Lewis, an art dealer from London appears, Bobby and friends are sent on a breakneck adventure of self-discovery, hedonism and violence, their frayed lives and assorted addictions - sex, money, fame, pick-'n'-mix and, above all, love - bleeding together in one glorious, ferocious slab of technicolour concrete prose.