Factory Town

By: Jon Bassoff

Narrated by: Donald Corren

Length: 5 hrs and 31 mins

Publisher's summary

Russell Carver, an enigmatic and tortured man in search of a young girl gone missing, has come to Factory Town, a post-industrial wasteland of abandoned buildings, crumbling asphalt, deadly characters, hidden secrets, and unspeakable depravity. Wandering deeper and deeper into the dangerous, dream-like, and darkly mysterious labyrinths in town, Russell stumbles upon clues that lead him closer not only to the missing girl but to his own troubled past as well. Because in Factory Town nothing is what it seems, no one is safe, and there’s no such thing as a clean escape.

From Jon Bassoff, author of Corrosion, 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. Welcome to the haunting, frightening, and disturbing experience that is Russell Carver’s search for the truth....

©2017 Jon Bassoff (P)2020 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

An Abstract, Lynchian Industrial Hellscape

Discussing 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'm going to give you a great big SPOILER WARNING for this whole damn review, and it begins now.

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. The material is part nightmare, part memory, part remembrance, all of it filtered through a dying, gunshot shattered brain.

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. For instance, Carver enters a run-down, abandoned theater, but exits a hospital. He hears music playing from a radio, but discovers it's actually an a cappella band. 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. Things shift - people, buildings, the entire town - with the impermanence of a truly screwy dream.

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. 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. 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.

Bassoff uses all of this as a template to explore the repercussions of abuse, and how the sins of the father are inherited by the son. It's a story of the nature of evil, and whether or not we can actually control our destinies. How much of our inner demons are genetically encoded, and how much of is learned behavior? A lot of the horror in this book is buried in symbolism or tucked away in inferences, but there's a few shocks to be had for sure.

Donald Corren does a fantastic job with the narration. His reading his clear and precise, and he provides enough differing voices to make it clear who's talking in conversations, adopting a suitably gravely voice for Carver but not overdoing it.

I found Factory Town to having a surprising amount of depth, and the writing is crisp with a few fun turns of phrase. One of my favorite lines in the book explains the strangeness of this disturbed city with "All them chemicals leaking into the town's hippocampus..." I also expect this book to be a rather divisive read, depending on one's patience for a rather non-straightforward narrative. This one is a far cry from conventional horror, but rich in character and environment. If you're curious what an abstract, hellish, industrial What Dreams May Come by way of David Lynch might look like, this one is well worth the investment.

Loved it. Fantastic

After reading Corrosion by Jon Bassoff, this book became an immediate must read. Now, the author has found his way on my "auto-buy" list. It's not a long list.

Factory Town is a dream like state of a novel. Surreal, but not overly artistic. The prose is written more matter of fact and dead-pan which made the darkness inside even that much more brilliant. There were so many moments that I wanted to highlight a passage but I had to stop since it happened too often. 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 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. I looked forward to reading this every time I picked up my kindle.

Not sure which I like better, Corrosion or Factory Town. FT tackles bigger issues, is more cosmic, yet at the end it came down to something very personal indeed. It reached for the stars and then came down and touched your heart. 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. As a father, the last 20% were intense.

Bravo

A PIg is a Pig

The book is full of lazy, grotesque writing and is exploitive of extreme violence and degradation for the sake of reader-revulsion. The author has a tendency to use the phrase "a long time" over and over and over again. I was challenged to finish this turkey somehow, which speaks to the author's manipulation of the reader's anticipation for a payoff. But there was none. It's like the car wreck that compels one not to look away. This is a grotesque book that has a promising premise but is a pointless, poorly written patchwork nightmare within which the protagonist moves, struggles, and suffers horribly to no resolution. The reader leaves this book worse for wear and degraded rather than enlightened or entertained. Sorry, this book was a twisted horror literally and figuratively, and would likely make great listening for a psychopath. Which, now that I think about it, will probably compel others in this day and age to rush out and read this awful thing. All the same, a pig in the mud is still a pig.