Perhaps no voice in drug literature has ever been as suited to its story as Nic Scheff’s. The episodic relapse saga Tweak is more than graphic, manic, and raw, it’s so relentless it’s almost as if — in the manner of every genuine, hope-to-die drunk, tweaker, or junkie you’re likely to meet — the author is unimpressed by the level of brutality he himself has endured. (If that’s the life you happen to live, then living it is absolutely normal.) Scheff was 21 when he banged out Tweak. The narrative’s got an unsettling, choppy rhythm, as if the words are as uncomfortable on the page as the adolescent protagonist was in his own skin. But as harrowing as the book’s more grisly moments — at one point our boy, in full junkie mode, nearly loses an arm to a blood infection — it’s the loneliness beneath them that rips your heart out. Think Catcher in the Rye — if Holden Caulfield had a thing for rigs. Tweak is the kind of book every generation of outsider kids will discover and make their own. Sometimes a reader needs that savage affirmation: the knowledge that somebody else has been where they are, and made it back to tell the tale.