Henrytown - by Chris Erickson (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Twenty years ago, Henrytown came crackling over Rocky Mountain radio frequencies as a spoken history--a series of tall tales Chris Erickson would recite between folk songs on his insomniac broadcast "The Old-Time Music & Lore." A chimerical masterwork of storytelling and performance art, Erickson's folklore recast the American Midwest as its own fantastical condition, captivating a cult-listenership steeped in small-town mythologies like Wisconsin Death Trip, Winesburg, Ohio, and Carl Sandburg's Rootabaga Pigeons.

This volume, produced in partnership between Dzanc Books and Graver Goods, brings that beloved town back to the page.

Local brainiac Amber Kusnetsov goes missing after a mediocre performance on a biology quiz. A deadly explosion at Polk Plastics sends plumes of acrid smoke into the community. Gloria-half-of-something the Wampus Cat murders dirtbike enthusiast Mandu Fam Lam Bartlum behind the Park Tavern. Old Lookie floats slowly over the earth on his adult tricycle. John Dinger the Large is on his way to Niantic to kill trolls!

Sung out by a town crier as mysteriously attuned to weather patterns and local myths as he is to the pandemonium of American speech, Chris Erickson's debut work isn't so much a novel as a telling the bees--a promiscuous, hive-minded folklore which speaks in many voices at once, past the human, and knows that every town is its own living breathing superorganism.

Review Quotes

"A woman named Lady Button who fashions herself a cape of sex toys; the town mayor, who brushes his teeth so hard he wears off the enamel; his wife, Pilar Kusnetsov, who gives birth to twenty-eight children; 'One Actual Local Geezer Named Misty, ' who, in one day, walks across the entire community to traverse the line between good and bad actors-these are but a few of the delightful characters in Henrytown, a nonlinear narrative which leaves one gasping at the power of the short burst woven into the larger tapestry. The cohesion of these dozens of disparate characters is testament to Chris Erickson's ability to distill the essence of human quirk into one narrative that makes the heart ache and sing, all at the same time. Henrytown ushers in an exciting new voice in experimental literature."

--Jacinda Townsend, author of Trigger Warning

"I don't write blurbs, on gp. If I wrote blurbs,
though, I would sure as fuck write one for Henrytown. I even considered
violating my policy to do it, but imagine how many previous requesters this
would piss off!"

--Joe Wenderoth, author of Letters to Wendy's

"I've long wondered whether writers were out there who
might take up the mantle of Derek McCormack's spare, acidic humor, and
relentless movement throughout equivalent bizarre tableaux. I've found
McCormack's logical heir in Chris Erickson's brilliant, relentless Henrytown,
a work as shifting and fragmented as the times, and as compelling a new voice
as I've encountered in years."

--Grant Maierhofer, author of Traumnovelle

"The project of reinvention is the task of all novelists, though so few are aware of it, let alone capable. Erickson intuits this, the task and the necessity. That every novel, when it's worthwhile, sets out to reinvent the novel as form, on the macro level; while on the micro level, reinventing language, risking seeming nonsense is the formation of new meanings..."

--The Whitney Review

From The Whitney Review:

"The project of reinvention is the task of all novelists, though so few are aware of it, let alone capable. Erickson intuits this, the task and the necessity. That every novel, when it's worthwhile, sets out to reinvent the novel as form, on the macro level; while on the micro level, reinventing language, risking seeming nonsense is the formation of new meanings...

Henrytown...works to extend a canon positioned on an axis longitudinally Steinian and latitudinally Faulknerian...Both authors, the American corollaries to Joyce, wrote novels that are rooted in the imaginary and its fundamental unfathomabilities, seeing in fiction one of the few realms of genuine freedom, where anything can be done, where there is no moral universe to contaminate or inhibit possibility; and that are simultaneously attuned both the visual and the sonorous properties of language in a certain raw sense, its potentials and failures, in defiance of established meaning. How writing is, among other things, akin to composing, and the novel is a kind of symphony. This is something that can't be taught. It can only be felt: this molding of intuition with the irrational, which is perhaps better known as the life force."