From Jon Bassoff, author of The Memory Ward and Beneath Cruel Waters, comes a dark, gritty, and surreal novel that is at once a compelling mystery and an exploration into the darkest recesses of the human soul.
Russell Carver, an enigmatic and tortured man in search of a missing girl, has come to Factory Town, a postindustrial wasteland of abandoned buildings, crumbling asphalt, deadly characters, hidden secrets, and unspeakable depravity. Wandering deeper and deeper into the dangerous, dreamlike, and darkly mysterious labyrinths in town, Russell stumbles upon clues that not only lead him closer to the girl, but to his own troubled past. Because in Factory Town nothing is what it seems, no one is safe, and there's no such thing as a clean escape.
Welcome to the haunting, frightening, and disturbing experience that is Russell Carver's search for the truth …
"This is a profoundly discomfiting and pessimistic exploration of a deeply damaged man, and when Bassoff 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."
"Factory Town: A hallucinatory descent into an urban hell that rivals Jim Thompson for stark terror. Jon Bassoff is a master of that territory where pulp becomes poetry, crime fiction mates with horror, but this novel is very much its own self-an unnervingly individual piece of work."
"Factory Town is a journeyman's surreal voyage through the very heart of hell. A novel full of a crazed, ugly, vivid, disturbing energy held together by a deft hand. Bassoff is the king of creepy crime-horror fiction."
"For those of us who love the horror-crime genre, Jon Bassoff is a godsend. Creepy, poetic, and beautifully dark, Factory Town is an absolutely mesmerizing ride."
"By turns brutal and lyrical, shocking and uplifting, Factory Town provides a visceral experience unlike any other novel you'll read this year. Jon Bassoff is quickly becoming a must-read author in the field of dark fiction. Don't miss this worthy follow-up to [Corrosion]."
"No crime writer today does bleakness and despair as well as Jon Bassoff. He has the voice of a modern-day David Goodis, if Goodis had been influenced by Stephen King. Factory Town is a thrilling genre-bending mystery that is as scary as it gets."
"Factory Town is the novel Kafka would have written had he lived longer. Brilliant writing, this, in the vein of Jung's shadow world. Bassoff's novel is the contemporary Pilgrim's Progress; Russell Carver, the Christian of John Bunyan's work, traveling through the Slough of Despond looking for a salvation that will never come. And, then-there are lines that make you weep at their truth and beauty. This is nihilism in its final, apocalyptic, terrible form."
"Bassoff's Factory Town reads like a forgotten outtake from Springsteen's Nebraska, played backward and piped through the air tube of Flann O'Brien's safety coffin. It's a howl-out-loud and a headfuck supreme, and I loved every word."
