The River Is Waiting

The River Is Waiting engages directly with several pressing social issues in contemporary American life. The novel is situated in the 2010s and early 2020s, a period marked by rising public awareness of opioid dependency, widespread scrutiny of the criminal justice system, and the devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic—particularly in prisons and other vulnerable settings. Against this backdrop, Lamb’s novel tells a personal story that reflects broader systemic failures.

Corby’s downward spiral after job loss, combined with his untreated trauma and substance use disorder, mirrors patterns documented in the growing opioid crisis in the USA. Journalistic exposés, such as Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (2021), Beth Macy’s Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America (2018), and Sam Quinones’s Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic (2015), have traced how opioids have become much more widely prescribed in recent decades despite the fact that such medications, like OxyContin, have long been known to leave patients extremely susceptible to developing an ongoing dependency. The number of Americans with opioid dependency has risen sharply in recent years, resulting in serious impacts on many communities, especially in rural and formerly vibrant industrial towns that are now dealing with economic stagnation.