The Black Veil

Paperback. English. Publisher: Faber. 2004. good.

While still in his twenties, Rick Moody found that a decade of alcohol, drugs and other indulgences had left him stranded in a depression so severe that he feared for his life. The road of excess led him not to the palace of wisdom but rather to a psychiatric hospital in one of New York's least exalted boroughs. The Black Veil is Rick Moody's account of that debilitating passage in his life. Anyone who has ever felt his or her own psychological footing slip, even briefly, will find this story of breakdown and return both harrowing and heartbreaking.