This is one wild book. For starters, like his previous novel, Corrosion, the author has never met a set of quotation marks he liked. Even in dialog, you may ask? Nope, not even in dialog. Sentences just run along; dialog bumping into or bracketing narration without attribution. And you know what else in wild in Factory Town? The story has no cohesive plot. The narrative reads like a movie penned by David Lynch and directed by Stanley Kubrick.
But the wildest thing about Factory Town is that it all works. I would go so far as to call Factory Town brilliant.
It’s tough to describe the plot in Factory Town because it’s so surreal. Scenes blend into each other with all the subtlety of a car accident, and many of them appear to have little to do with each other. On the surface, Factory Town is about a man named Russell Carver who is searching for a young girl he’s never met named, Alana. All Carver has is a digital printout of what the girl may look like and an overwhelming desire to save her from a certain death. His search brings him to Factory Town where a man named, The Cowboy controls the town. The Cowboy has written a Book of Edict’s that everyone must follow, and the prime edict is that all children must be murdered so the town can cease to exist. Mostly everyone in town works at the factory but it is not clear what it produces. Russell goes into the town and finds a mixture of old friends, cannibalistic citizens, a thieving nun, a whore, his wife, and even a small child who runs around in a cape and brandishes a fake sword. Russell is constantly assaulted, has cash thrown at him, is surrounded with sordid sex, and worst of all he is constantly stymied in his quest for Alana. And, all of this occurs in just in the first portion of the novel.
Despite this jumble of weirdness, as I said, it all works. Without giving away what makes it work, I can say that the reader must be patient and pay attention to the scenes as much as they are able to. There is a tie that binds everything together and it starts to become apparent by the last chapters of the novel.
Factory Town is a roller coaster of emotion. Readers might be confused by the plotting, but there is no denying the empathy we feel toward Russell as he searches for the young girl and the horror he feels when everyone in the town turns against him. And, Russell’s epiphany by the end of the story will certainly shock most of his readers as well as leave them heartbroken.
Would I recommend Factory Town? You bet! I can’t think of a more interesting, thought provoking and adventurous story that I’ve read all year.
- Inflictions - April 11, 2015
- The Equinox - April 2, 2015
- The Nightmare Girl - March 9, 2015
- Intruder - February 12, 2015
- The Only Red Is Blood - February 12, 2015
- Insanity Tales - February 3, 2015
- Qualia Nous - January 28, 2015
- Once Upon An Apocalypse - November 25, 2014
- The Janus Demon - November 17, 2014
- Case White - November 7, 2014
