Darren Allen

Drowning is Fine 2021 Darren Allen

Danny Hickman will do whatever it takes to become a great artist. He escapes from a meaningless job by fabricating mental illness and he escapes from an equally meaningless art scene by fabricating tiny clay heads. But nothing seems to give him the freedom he craves.

Daniel is also desperate to find love-to break the catastrophic cycle of painful confusion that he seems to be magically bound to; but his attempts to find a partner-indeed to have any kind of satisfying sexual encounter-only seem to ensnare him in more confusion, shame and loneliness.

A chance encounter with a Russian criminal followed by one of the more bizarre of Daniel's romantic failures leads him to an unusual and psychologically liberating evening with a prostitute which, in turn, leads to an emotional armageddon that threatens to literally obliterate him.

Drowning is Fine, is the tragi-comic coming-of-age story of Daniel Hickman, a young man struggling to survive as a sane man in love and an artist in dystopian London; goals which turn out to be two aspects of the same apocalyptic mission-to see the world as it is, in all its sordid beauty.