Spiral's End: Hepatitis C & Me

Character Guide

Spoiler-free — fuller detail (with spoilers, if you want them) lives in the reader's Guide tab.

Narrator (the author)

An unnamed first-person narrator whose life spirals through drinking, drug use, and grandiose CIA-related delusions; early in the book he is a salesman/recruiter drifting between jobs, relationships, and benders.

Caroline

The narrator's girlfriend during his worst psychotic episodes, present for the Ritz-Carlton, Mountain Park, and 'robot' delusions; she initially gets pulled into believing some of his conspiracy theories.

Gwen Evere

The narrator's wife/partner, involved with him in pill schemes and hospital cons; their relationship is marked by chaos, fighting, and shared substance abuse.

Corey

A close friend and sometime business partner who houses the narrator, gets dragged into his antics, and eventually kicks him out after a betrayal.

Stewart Black

An investor/business associate who advances the narrator money and later bluntly calls him a thief, offering one of the few clear-eyed assessments of his behavior.

Brian Huff

The narrator's boss at CV Confidential who initially trusts him with major placements but eventually fires him after he disappears on a bender, telling him to go to AA.

Dan Jones

The narrator's stepdad, who stayed with his mother through her illness; his post-funeral dating becomes a source of family resentment.

The narrator's mother

Introduced as dying of cancer; her illness and eventual death are a major emotional weight on the narrator early in the book.

Trevor (Complete Abandon (group name))

A figure connected to early recovery meetings the narrator attends while detoxing and spiraling with paranoid, hell-fixated thoughts.

David, Lauren, and Trent

Friends who join the narrator on a chaotic, drug-fueled road trip that ends in a car-window-smashing meltdown.

Faust

A drug supplier/friend who fronts the narrator LSD, involved in one of his hallucination-heavy escapades in Alpharetta.

Mooney

A friend who enthusiastically buys into the narrator's grandiose delusions and business schemes during a wild hotel stay.

Glossary

The Big Book

The foundational text of Alcoholics Anonymous, quoted directly in the book for its 'Ninth Step Promises' about the rewards of sobriety.

Ninth Step / Fifth Step

Steps in the AA Twelve-Step program; the Fifth Step involves confessing one's wrongs, referenced as a turning point in the narrator's recovery.

The rooms

AA slang for meetings and the recovery community itself.

Sponsor

An AA term (implied throughout) for a mentor figure who guides a newcomer through the Twelve Steps.

Narc

Slang for an informant to police; being labeled a 'narc' as a teen isolates the narrator from his old drug-using friends.

Gwen Evere script/package

The narrator's invented term for a con routine used to manipulate hospital staff into prescribing opioids like Dilaudid or morphine.

Consumers

A clinical term for psychiatric patients that the delusional narrator misreads as sinister proof of a conspiracy.

Debriefed / debriefing

Military/intelligence jargon the narrator delusionally believes applies to his own hospitalization, imagining he's being interrogated by secret agents.

Family

Ironic term used for the loose network of fellow addicts and hippie-adjacent acquaintances in Little Five Points who enable the narrator's drug use.

Bender

A prolonged period of continuous heavy drinking or drug use, used throughout to describe the narrator's relapses.

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