Virtually everything in Factory Town is shaped by Carver's personal history and experiences, both the things he remembers and that which he is trying to hide or escape from. During Carver's urgent search for Alana, a lost runaway, the narrative is rife with figments of the things that could have been in Carver's own life. The characters that exist beyond Carver are representations of figures in his own life, stand-ins from his own abusive childhood and the living traumas that were his parents. Things shift - people, buildings, the entire town - with the impermanence of a truly screwy dream. These aren't errors of the author or a failing of the editor, so much as it's an effort to capture the "logic," such as it is, of a lucid, waking nightmare. He hears music playing from a radio, but discovers it's actually an a cappella band. For instance, Carver enters a run-down, abandoned theater, but exits a hospital. Told in first person point-of-view, author Jon Bassoff takes us through the surreal, fluid dream-scape of Factory Town and its ever-shifting landscape. The material is part nightmare, part memory, part remembrance, all of it filtered through a dying, gunshot shattered brain. The book opens with Carver's suicide with a bullet to his temple, and what follows is a mental sojourn through the shattered mind of a man in his death throes. I'm going to give you a great big SPOILER WARNING for this whole damn review, and it begins now. BravoĪn Abstract, Lynchian Industrial Hellscapeĭiscussing Factory Town is a bit difficult, since its plot hinges so directly on an early action taken by the book's central character, Russell Carver.
I started to read as if I was looking through a telescope at a distant land, but it ended up more as a mirror reflecting back the world we live in. It reached for the stars and then came down and touched your heart. FT tackles bigger issues, is more cosmic, yet at the end it came down to something very personal indeed. Not sure which I like better, Corrosion or Factory Town. I looked forward to reading this every time I picked up my kindle. There is a lot here, it is deep, and I am quite sure that I didn't 'get' it all, but here's a bit of what's inside the absurdist world of Factory Town: There is the question of if innocence can be saved, if our "God" is dead, or is he alive and 'mad' and hooked up to some bizarre, almost steam-punk life support system? ARe we all in Factory Town? When we fight monsters, do we also become one? Are we doomed to repeat the sins of our father? Deep subjects, yet plenty entertaining. The imagery was incredible, the surprises often, and the dialogue that appears inside the chapter rather than separated by quotes I have found is now pulling me deeper into the consciousness of the characters. There were so many moments that I wanted to highlight a passage but I had to stop since it happened too often. The prose is written more matter of fact and dead-pan which made the darkness inside even that much more brilliant.
Factory Town is a dream like state of a novel. Now, the author has found his way on my "auto-buy" list. 7 years.After reading Corrosion by Jon Bassoff, this book became an immediate must read. Single territory rights for trade books worldwide rights for academic books. Print and/or digital, including use in online academic databases. Web display, social media, apps or blogs. Personal presentation use or non-commercial, non-public use within a company or organization only. Not for commercial use, not for public display, not for resale. Personal Prints, Cards, Gifts, Reference.
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