Live Till I Die
Random Acts of Senseless Violence
By Jack Womack
25 Sep, 2025
The End of History
Jack Womack’s 1993 Random Acts of Senseless Violence is a near-future coming-of-age science fiction novel. Random Acts is either the first (by internal chronology) or the fifth (by publication date) novel in Womack’s DryCo sequence. Publication order defined the context in which readers first encountered this, so I will use that.
Twelve-year-old Lola “Booz” Hart, her younger sister Cheryl “Boob,” and their parents live in upper middle-class bliss in New York. True, Lola’s father’s scriptwriting job is either feast or famine, but her mother is an academic. Prosperity, if rather variable, is assured, so long as the United States does not collapse.
The current civil unrest? The current economic downturn? Passing inconveniences. Soon, normalcy will be restored.