One of author David Eddings two mainstream novels, written in the 1970s, before the publication of The Belgariad, The Losers examines the effect of the welfare state on a group of misfits living in a seedy area of Spokane, Washington, as seen through the eyes of his lead character Raphael.
At the beginning of the book, Raphael is a golden boy, in Metalline Falls, a star football player, and an all-round decent, if rather detached, kind of person. From school, he enrols in Reed College (Eddings' own university) where he meets up with Jacob Damon Flood, a rich cynical young man from Detroit. Flood's influence is insidious and destructive, as he introduces Raphael to drink, and to Bel, an older woman and a friend of the Flood family, who seduces him.
After a row with Bel, engineered by Flood, Raphael takes off drunk in his car and collides with a train, leaving him without one leg, and genitalia.
He runs away from his friends and family, to hide and to adjust to his new situation, and finds himself in Spokane. A small private income from a trust fund and a compensation payout from the railroad, mean that he doesn't need to rely on welfare, but can't live luxuriously, so he takes an upstairs appartment overlooking a run-down neighbourhood inhabited mostly by 'welfairies' -- unmarried mothers, drunks, the mentally ill, and no-hopers of various descriptions.
He observes the patterns of their lives while simultaneously fighting to keep himself out of the clutches of the Social Services -- people that Flood once described as 'girls who never learned to type'. Through his observations, he comes up with a theory of 'loserhood' -- a cycle of dependence, desperation and crisis which is encouraged and nurtured by the Social Workers, unintentionally, but inevitably.
Into this situtation, comes Flood, who has sought Raphael out, and who is not content to merely be a detached observer. He gets involved with the people in the neigbourhood, with disastrous results for them and for himself -- loserhood is an infectious condition.
The novel is a scathing attack on 1970s social policy, but it is also an involving and compelling story, well written and beautifully characterised. It shows Eddings' talent for dialogue which made his fantasy stories so popular, but it is darker than the fantasies, more original, and more tightly plotted. This book is probably Eddings' best work and is well worth reading if you can get hold of it.