ABSTRACT
Working Up the Bottle
Mike Spry
Working Up the Bottle is the story of three friends from youth who decide to rob a restaurant.  Hunter, a chef with suicidal tendencies yet cursed with drunken immortality; Riley, a waitress (who Hunter loves) trapped in a dead-end job and an abusive relationship; and Jack, a successful entrepreneur who amuses himself by toying with his old friends’ existence.  The novel finds Hunter and Riley trying to achieve some measure of salvation in escaping the world of the service industry; a forgotten community of addicts, miscreants, misfits, and savages.  Set against the backdrop of an unnamed Canadian metropolis, Working Up the Bottle is a darkly humorous tragedy that discusses the sad reality of the educated working poor, characters whose aspirations have long since dissolved into the bottom of their drinks and their desperate attempt to climb back to the top.