Chain restaurants at the mall used to mean something in this country. Stand-alone restaurant storefronts just a short jaunt away from the mall’s irresistible gravitational pull did too. Or at least I thought they did. When I was a teen in suburban Pittsburgh during the early aughts, Olive Garden, TGI Fridays, Outback Steakhouse, Texas Roadhouse, and if we were really feeling fancy, Bravo! or Cheesecake Factory were aspirational places with their goopy fettucine alfredo and chicken parm, dressing-soaked Caesar salads, paradoxically drippy yet dry Jack Daniels-coated wings, and whatever the hell was on the menu at Texas Roadhouse (burgers?). These chains represented the best America had to offer: salty, cheesy, kind of disgusting calorie bombs that would be exactly the same so-so quality on every occasion in every location. Not to mention carbo-loading deals like endless breadsticks to add a reeking garlic-breathed punch to the American promise. It wasn’t just the food. Though I was too young at the time to fully appreciate it (and I was too nerdy to ever order booze at a restaurant as a teen), these chain restaurants also provided the birthright of all Americans in liquid form: the possibility of getting shit-faced on syrupy drinks in alarmingly fluorescent colors and then wandering around blurry-eyed, double-visioned through a JCPenney.

Sure, my memory may be a bit too rosy. The bloom was coming off the onion even then as chain restaurants, at least in my hometown, were already staffed by people with crippling drug addictions. Yet, pinned pupils and pain clinic-provided oxy scripts seem almost quaint when compared to the late-stage American rot of chain restaurants in malls today. That singular Fridays or Applebee’s is usually one of the only spaces left open, surrounded by ransacked, vacant store after store, stopped escalators, dusty indoor playgrounds, the ruins of Santa’s wonderland still lingering from last Christmas, and the one weird shop left open like a puppy mill pet store.

Within this post-consumerist hellscape, then, what is there left to do but patronize that Fridays and down as many instant hangover margaritas as your liver can still withstand after waking up on your kitchen floor and serving a hard shift of drinking on the job? What other option do you, as an American, have other than to stare into a stained, squeakily upholstered corner booth and hallucinate happier memories of days gone by that just might be false, while waiting for Dad to reemerge from the bathroom and proudly show you a photo of the smiley-faced shit he just took?

This is the grim and pitch-black comedic American reality as reflected in writer and artist Jordan Sullivan’s short story “Drinking Margaritas at the Mall” in his new collection of the same (amusing) title, published by Amygdala. Sullivan has a particular knack for defining the crumbling dissolution of malls and, by proxy, the American Dream—here represented by the ironically named Wonderland Mall, a place that in better days sold the story’s protagonist a classy, treasured shirt, “an alien passing a joint with the words, ‘Take me to your dealer’”—that is so familiar it sent my rapidly aging millennial brain spinning. The story contains many other vivid snapshots of a society gone wrong such as Dad puking on Mom’s grave while attempting to plant a flower or a boss who “had part of his jaw shot off a while back during some bar fight over the fucking Cincinnati Reds.” Not to mention the sheer correctness of the description of linoleum floors, the tackiest of all flooring options, as “the kind of floor you don’t mind trashing, the kind you feel good about spilling a beer on or ashing a cigarette onto without ever cleaning it up.”

Though “Drinking Margaritas at the Mall” is just the book’s eponymous tale, it contains the shit-coated thematic kernel at the heart of the other stories in Sullivan’s collection: the pill-popping, drug-huffing, alcohol-soaked dissolution of people living—and frequently dying, blue in the face, while gripping a PS1 controller—at the edge of the wider social degradation of mostly middle of nowhere America. Even stories set in New York or New Orleans feel at the precipice of civilization. Unlike Sullivan’s previous book Booze, Bullshit & Buttfucking, either a fragmented psychotic channeling of the United States’ warped late capitalist hivemind or a deranged scrawl read on the lobby bathroom wall of a Best Western before stealing a free omlette from the breakfast buffet, the protagonists in Drinking Margaritas at the Mall are not famous people embarking on blackout benders, behaving badly in an Ohio Burger King, or spewing their 9/11 conspiracy theories and singular hatred for Tom Hanks on a secret Twitter account. In contrast, Drinking Margaritas at the Mall showcases the populace as “Natural Born Losers,” as one character quips. These are the deadbeats that spend their days tweaking, fiending, and burning holes in the washed-out floral bedspreads of bed bug-ridden Motel 6s, Days Inns, and Super 8s, similar to Sullivan’s masterful paranoia painting Motel. Motel features two people peering out of the cheap drapes and peephole of a grimy motel, a scene that so viscerally depicts the experience of substance-fueled panic—or potentially more realistic fear of cops or the drug dealer they swindled—I’ve seen it posted several times without context on X in recent weeks.

Similarly, Drinking Margaritas at the Mall captures American life as a chemically induced rollercoaster ride through addiction and roadside wrecks where rehab centers are just for selling fent, AA meetings are quick pitstops on a flame-out odyssey, and everyone has gone a year, like the protagonist of “Gasoline,” without “drinking a glass of water or eating a vegetable.” The sheer diversity of drugs sniffed, snorted, shot up, and smoked is so dizzying—Percs, fent, coke, crack (bong hits of crack?), meth, unholy mixtures of meth and GHB—that it rivals Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo’s suitcase buffet of substances in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Unlike the Good Doctor Hunter S. Thompson’s notorious ride through Barstow, Drinking Margaritas at the Mall doesn’t even come within spotting distance of the American Dream’s tidal wave rolling back. There isn’t even a whiff of Las Vegas’ nicotine-stained winner-takes-all jackpot possibility; the only shining star to reach for within Sullivan’s fictional (yet not all that fictional) world is the distinction of becoming a meth chef rather than a meth cook. Violence also lurks around the periphery of the characters’ burn-outs, like a dad who shot up a middle school or a mom threatening her child with a steak knife for the transgression of eating the last Oreo. Understandable.

Though the debauchery throughout the book is dually lurid and entertaining, it’s Sullivan’s spot-on descriptions of America’s sprawling decrepitude that really do it for me: roller skating rinks turned into Amazon fulfillment centers and Shell stations with the S burned out (Hell…get it?). The blight isn’t only commercial real estate. Even people’s fancy McMansions have gone to seed, as in Britney’s home in “The Suburbs.” What from the outside is just a patch of dirt rather than a well-watered lawn is even more destructo within:

“Inside, the place was trashed. I mean, all the furniture looked like shit from a palace, but it was stained and dotted with cigarette burns. Fast food wrappers were everywhere. Ashtrays and coffee cups overflowed with cigarette butts. And the house smelled horrible.”

Sullivan’s nailing of the country’s no man’s landscape is further emphasized by the inclusion of his delightfully disturbed drawings between each story, many of which I recognized from perusing a display of his works on paper in the FolkArtwork Collective’s booth at this year’s Outsider Art Fair. Unlike Sullivan’s paintings that typically depict one singular scene, his drawings, done on what looks to be tossed-out school library book pages, are a frenzied mishmash of Americana dereliction: neon signs for rundown rat motels advertising the bare minimum amenities like adult movies, color tv, am/pm, and the seductive sway of a water bed (who could resist?), facades of check cashing places, down-and-out bars, and whatever The Gold Diggers Entertainment is, and a questionable cast of shady characters, none of whom seem to have eyes that focus. These figures are frequently laughably distorted: dazed expressions with cigs dangling precariously from their hangdog lips as they push their sweating shots of well liquor around a dive’s beer-stained bar top. At times, some fantasy pops in like a rodeo bull rider, as well as global strife with some type of invading guerrilla fighters, like the hallucinated embodiment of terrorist boogiemen paranoia. Sullivan pairs these chaotic collections with comedically depressing texts in the attempted ornate script found in high school notebooks such as “Life goes on till it doesn’t…”; “It’ll Be Better Tomorrow”; and, my preferred, “An Oasis of Horror in a Desert of Boredom,” which could easily be an alternate title for Drinking Margaritas at the Mall.

These wry phrases mimic some of the most memorable bleak lines in the short stories. Alongside Booze, Bullshit & Buttfucking, Sullivan has once again proved himself to be singularly talented at concise fatalistic nihilism. Some of my favorites one-liners include: “Time doesn’t disappear—it accumulates, like dirt filling a grave”; “Sometimes you win a scratch-off, sometimes you catch a fish, but most of the time, you end up with a meth dealer’s pubes stuck in your teeth”; and the simple yet effective, “There’s no bottom to this pit.” Within Sullivan’s stories and drawings, there really isn’t a bottom, the characters just keep digging and digging.

Even though both the stories and the drawings feel outrageous and exaggerated, there is a brutal accuracy here. Take one drawing that features a person hunched, either nodding out or with their head in their hands, sitting on the curb outside of a 7-Eleven, a man guzzling a beer, not even bothering to paper bag it, and yet another dude with bleary blackened eyes and mussed, unwashed hair. This could be a daily impression of a walk in my neighborhood, minus the 7-Eleven on Avenue A, which has now closed (great–more empty eyesores!).

And I know what you’re thinking—surely, Emily, this is not representative of the United States. This isn’t a country of junked-out lowlifes looking for a fix, doing whatever they have to, even if it’s rolling an out-of-towner at a gas station for his maxed-out credit card. Well, ever since starting this review, I’ve tried to think about how to convey the accuracy of Drinking Margaritas at the Mall without sending readers on a long drive through West Virginia or Pennsylvania to stare at twitchy people rattling around a Bob Evans parking lot. Miraculously, though, I found it right on time: the perfect video posted to X (ok, fine, Elon is good for something). This video, taken from an Ohio cop’s body cam, centers around a middle-aged woman and her elderly mother stopped at a generic strip mall filled with rarely patronized stores like Mattress Firm. With a warrant out for the driver’s arrest, the duo and their many dogs, if the errant barking is any indication, stand outside of their plastic bag-filled hoarder-mobile. Suddenly, the cop blurts a high-pitched giggle as he sees a chubby raccoon, apparently one of the other pets in this Noah’s arc of a beater, playing with a cloudy, burned, clearly frequently used meth pipe. The elderly woman attempts to snatch it away from the raccoon, but is stopped by the cop, who explains it’s now evidence. “Well, I don’t want him to have that!” she exclaims. After the cop rudely snatches away the first meth pipe, the raccoon finds another—a newer one—and stuffs it in its mouth as if it’s going to smoke it.

Don’t you love nature?

This video feels right out of one of Sullivan’s stories in Drinking Margaritas at the Mall. Maybe. To be honest, I’m not even sure his delightfully fucked-up diagnosis of the country goes quite this far and this absurd. But it’s surely enough to conclude, for better or for worse (ok, for worse): Yes, this is US.