Factory Town

In the middle of the night, a desperate man breaks into a house, confronts the woman who lives there, and shoots himself in the head. The backstory to these strange events unfolds as in a terrible dream. Vicious criminal Russell Carver, searching for a lost girl, progresses through the sordid darkness of Factory Town, a post-apocalyptic “town of sin, town of sadness, town of hatred.” He wades through a hallucinatory world of threatening men, victimized women, and vulnerable children, while constantly haunted by the deeds of his abusive father and his own past behavior, the full horror of which is slowly disclosed over the course of his nightmarish journey. Carver’s story is filled with stomach-turning descriptions of violence and grotesque characters, and shot through with despair. This is a profoundly discomfiting and pessimistic exploration of a deeply damaged man, and when Bassoff (Corrosion) invokes real-world horrors alongside the fantastical ugliness of Factory Town and its inhabitants, he suggests that similar foulness is common to all people. This is one to read with all the lights on. (Nov.)