Not at all ...

... No offence? (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

"It seems this new wave is in thrall to literature's most base instincts, and much of it seems to be a glorification of drug use, nihilism and sex. And although I realize that this might make me sound like some kind of puritan (I'm not), I wonder how else I'm supposed to react to reading stories about drug addicts having sex with transsexual prostitutes, and the like."

This sort of thing doesn't offend me, but it is likely to bore me. I've known the drug scene a lot better than most people, and it's not terribly interesting, actually. Fictional drug scenes tend to be more interesting than the real thing, though rarely interesting enough. Fictional bars tend to be more interesting than real ones.

As for The Higher Power Of Lucky being banned from school libraries because of the use of the word scrotum, I was simply reminded of Vivian Stanshall's Rawlinson's End and the character of Scrotum, who was, I believe, a wrinkled old retainer.

Update: After I wrote the above, I kept thin king that I had heard about Scrotum, the wrinkled old retatiner long before I heard of Stanshall. Then, I remembered that I had first heard about it from a gay acquaintance when I was in college (a gay acquaintance? of mine? at a Catholic college? yes). He referred to him as a character in what he thought was a secret G&S operetta called The Sod's Opera. I have since discovered this: Request for Erotica Producer Information.