A short life of the author
Tony O’Neill (b. 1978) was born in Manchester, England. He moved to Los Angeles in his early twenties and spent years as a heroin addict while working as a musician — he played keyboards for Marc Almond and later joined the Brian Jonestown Massacre. His musical career and his addiction overlapped in the same Hollywood milieu, and both became material for his writing.
Life and Career
Digging the Vein (2006) — a memoir of addiction in Hollywood — established O’Neill’s confessional mode: lean prose, no self-pity, no redemption arc, just the daily grind of scoring, using, and surviving. Down and Out on Murder Mile (2008) moved into fictional territory but with the same raw authority, following the narrator through heroin addiction in London. Sick City (2010) was a Los Angeles crime novel about the intersection of addiction, celebrity, and the underground economy. O’Neill co-wrote Hero of the Underground (2008) with Jason Peter, the NFL player, about Peter’s descent into addiction after retiring from professional football.
O’Neill has also worked as a writing teacher, a journalist covering addiction policy, and a contributor to publications including the New York Post, Salon, and The Fix.
Themes and Style
O’Neill writes about addiction without the redemption narratives that dominate recovery literature. His addicts don’t have epiphanies; they wake up sick, hustle for money, score drugs, use them, and repeat. His prose is lean, fast, and unsparing — closer to Hubert Selby Jr.’s Requiem for a Dream than to the literary memoirs of the recovery industry. The specificity of the drug world — the language, the rituals, the hierarchies — is rendered with insider precision.
Key Works
- Digging the Vein (2006)
- Down and Out on Murder Mile (2008)
- Sick City (2010)
Collecting O’Neill
Digging the Vein (2006, Contemporary Press) first editions bring $10–$30. Small print runs make early titles genuinely scarce.