Trade paperback format.

Dr. Peter S. Murphy needs fifteen thousand dollars by the end of the day, or the city of Los Angeles can say goodbye to the El Healtho clinic. A recovery center for the most severe cases of alcoholism in the state even if no one ever does quite seem to get dry there El Healtho has been the bane of Dr. Murphys existence ever since he started running it. But now that its doors are about to close forever, Dr. Murphy finds hell do anything to keep it open.

Up to and including admitting Humphrey Van Twyne III, a patient with an extremely violent past whose wealthy family has the means to keep El Healtho open for business. Sure, the man isnt exactly an alcoholic. And yes, what he really needs is to be under the care of the surgeons who performed the lobotomy thats rendered Van Twyne all but a vegetable. But the moneys good until the rag-tag group of neer-do-wells at El Healtho begin to wreak havoc with Dr. Murphys plans, and suddenly no one day has ever seemed so long.

A literary precursor to One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, The Alcoholics is Thompson like youve never read him before, a pitch-black, mad-cap portrait of deviant behavior that is at once darkly comic, humane and harrowing.