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 not only lead him closer 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...
Praise for FACTORY TOWN:
"This is a profoundly discomfiting and pessimistic exploration of a deeply damaged man, and when Bassoff (
Corrosion) 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." -
Publishers Weekly "
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." -Ramsey Campbell, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of
Ancient Images "
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." -Tom Piccirilli, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of
The Last Kind Words "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." -John Rector,
Wall Street Journal bestselling author of
Already Gone,
Lost Things, and
Out of the Black "In
Factory Town, Jon Bassoff gives us Russell Carver, a man whose desperate search for a missing girl takes him to a bleak city where hope has long since been abandoned, and the grotesque is accepted as normal. 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 last year's must-read Corrosion." -Allan Leverone, author of
Final Vector and
Mr. Midnight "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." -Jason Starr, international bestselling author of
The Craving and
The Returning "
Factory Town is the novel Kafka would have written had he lived longer. Brilliant writing, this, in the vein of Jung's shadow world. Jon 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, like: 'She had once been beautiful, so beautiful that I almost believed in God, but beauty falls apart, just like everything, rusts and rots, disintegrates and deteriorates.' This is nihilism in its final, apocalyptic, terrible form." -Les Edgerton, author of
The Rapist,
The Bitch and
The Genuine, Imitation, Plastic Ki