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 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.