It is the late 1980s. Punk is long dead. Not everyone made it.In London E1: the leftovers and left behind are still alive and still dreaming. Facing up to Thatcherism, despondency, drugs and desire. This is a world where everything and everyone is negotiable.Everyone is searching for something, if only for a way out.Keith 'Spike' Williams is looking for a spark to ignite his life. Going nowhere until his old friend, the mysterious Gene Campbell reappears on the scene with a pocketful of hope and a crazy dream. The Big City Beats are born - a hard-faced Spoken Word act; arbiters of attitude and addiction, holding up a mirror to an apathetic, doom-ridden society. Spike follows in Gene's aftermath through the alleyways of Whitechapel and neon-lit streets of Soho, where dreams turn to nightmares, reality bites hard and not everyone is going to make it out alive.Bleak and black humoured, Glenn Carmichael and Kevin Evans's cult novel has been long overdue a resurrection. The Burning Eye edition of this fast-paced quest for 'kicks and meaning' is the definitive cut. Raymond Carver meets Hubert Selby Jr. in Spike's search for something, anything, approximating truth, somewhere in the treachery and dereliction of a London that you may recognise, but that you will never see the same again.