Order FACTORY TOWN here
(also reviewed)
Order CORROSION here
What does the history of Factory Town have to do with anything?
A legacy of sin, she said. Hell on Earth. A town in need of death.
I used to be afraid of hell, when I was a little boy. I was raised in a non-practicing Catholic family who used every trick in the book to bottle up and channel a kid's energy into positive endeavours. In perspective, it was a stupid scheme because I didn't even know what hell looked like, I just didn't want to get stuck with all the shitty people for enernity, which leads me to my point here: there is a hell for everyone. A place where reality is constructed from your worst possible fears. A place like FACTORY TOWN, the latest demented invention of boundary-challenging genre author Jon Bassoff. The little boy in me would've died a million deaths in Factory Town, yet couldn't have managed his way out of it.
FACTORY TOWN is not your classic, straightforward, point A to point B narrative. It requires active collaboration from the reader, starting with the enigmatic prologue that doesn't seem like it had anything to do with the rest of the novel at first. FACTORY TOWN is the story of a man, Russell Carver, looking for a little girl in the dreamlike (nightmare-like, really), highly symbolic landscape of Factory Town. Obviously, something has went wrong in his investigation and he found himself trapped at the end of something. FACTORY TOWN is not the kind of novel where figuring things out helps in some way. It's a long, dramatic odyssey into the heart of nothingness and there's nothing you can do but witness the imminent crash between symbolism and reality.
Jon Bassoff's first novel (well, second really) CORROSION gathered some praise from impressive names in the publishing industry, such as Jason Starr, Marcus Sakey and personal favourite Tom Piccirilli. I remember thinking it was all right, but not standout material. CORROSION felt like a rotoscoped Jim Thompson novel, set in a rotting town. FACTORY TOWN is wildly different from its predecessor. Whatever Bassoff attempted with CORROSION, he cracked it own and let it flow in FACTORY TOWN. There is no ties to realism in this novel. It functions according to its own fluid logic. It's a good thing, because Jon Bassoff focused on creating vivid, haunting tableaus with every scene, causality and logic be damned, and these tableaus are the main selling point of FACTORY TOWN.
Nicole's voice: Please, Cory. Leave him alone. He hasn't done nothing.
The hell he hasn't! We all done something! We're all sinners in the eyes of the Lord! We're all sinners in the eyes of me! Come out, boy! Where you hiding?
As you might've noticed in this quotation I made, Jon Bassoff doesn't use dialogue tags, the way legendary author Cormac McCarthy doesn't either. I can imagine how much easier it must be to create fiction without them. It must work wonders for the creative flow. From a reader's point of view though, it's somewhat of a hurdle. I realize it's not fair to criticize a novel for its unusual punctuation, but it made it difficult for me to get into a reading groove. Infinitely more so than the use of symbolism, which Jon Bassoff was worried enough about that he offers an explanation for FACTORY TOWN on his website. I thought the symbolism in FACTORY TOWN was dynamic and involving, and not overly difficult to decipher. I had fun piecing Russell Carver''s story back up by myself from the clues Jon Bassoff scattered in his narrative.
I thought FACTORY TOWN was amazing. It's a surreal, dreamlike and highly symbolic novel about facing yourself, except that it's not exactly your typical coming-of-age story. It's more like a disintegration of the self, akin to what mental illness patients must be facing on a daily basis. FACTORY TOWN is what the corruption of one's perception of reality must feel like, at least it's the closest thing I've read in recent memory and the strange punctuation actually helps making it feel like a disturbed man's diary. So yeah, love it or hate it, I'm going all-in on Jon Bassoff, taking him for who he is. Unlike many other writers, he has found what makes him unique. FACTORY TOWN is a disorienting nightmare, a challenging and unique mystery, a blend of psychological horror, urban fantasy, gothic fiction and noir like nothing you've had the privilege of reading before.
