One October night in the depressed steel town of Lodi, Ohio, two police officers respond to a call about trespassers in the derelict Lodi Steel mill. A chase through the crumbling cathedral of steel columns launches a chain of events that will test the officers’ partnership and leave a boy to fend for himself in a hardscrabble Rust Belt neighborhood choked by joblessness, boredom, and addiction. On the opposite side of town, a young woman steps out of a rust-bucket Grand Marquis into an all-night diner. Instead of luggage, she carries mementos: a tattoo she inked herself and a wallet-sized photograph of a boy who disappeared. She doesn’t realize her ex-boyfriend has hired two brothers to track her down and bring her back, by any means necessary. The complex female leads of Hungry Town, with its sharp dialogue and poetic sensibility, turn classic noir and cop drama tropes on their heads. These morally complicated characters weave in and out of each other’s lives, sometimes violently, sometimes with surprising compassion. |
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“For fans of American Rust by Philipp Meyer and Ohio by Stephen Markley . . . comes Jason Kapcala’s Hungry Town (2022), a Rust Belt-set crime drama with serious literary chops―”
“―ghost stories of mill workers searching for severed hands, tales of people engulfed by boiler explosions. In Lodi, everyone had a story to tell about the mill.”
“―so as morning drew near, Stefanie Rieux lay awake in their bedroom on Hideaway Hill, thinking about her partner and three kids she'd only just met―two living, one dead.”
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