David Leveraux is an Apprentice Flavour Chemist at one of the world's leading production houses. While testing Sweetness #9, he notices that the artificial sweetener causes unsettling side-effects in laboratory rats and monkeys. But with his career amd family at risk, David keeps his suspicions to himself.
Year later, Sweetness #9 is America's most popular sweetner - and David's family is changing. His wife is gaining weight, his daughter is depressed, and his son has stopped using verbs. Is Sweetness #9 to blame, along with David's failure to stop it? Or are these just symptoms of the American condition?
An exciting literary debut, SWEETNESS #9 is a darkly comic, wildly imaginative investigation of whether what we eat makes us who we are.
Stephan Eirik Clark is the author of the short story collection Vladimir's Mustache. Born in West Germany and raised between England and the United States, Clark holds a Master's degree in English Literature with a creative writing emphasis from the Univeristy of California, Davis and a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. A former print and radio journalist, he lives in Minneapolis and teaches creative writing at Augsburg College. Sweetness #9 is his first novel.