At last count, Hometown was up to 57 reviews, and most of them were very positive (52% 5 star and 25% 4 star bay-beee!). Unfortunately, I haven’t received the boost in readership that I expected when I hit fifty reviews. Apparently, while something does in fact happen at twenty reviews, the additional boost at fifty is a hopeful indie writers’ urban legend.
As I read through these reviews, though, I’ve seen a number with questions or issues that I’d like to address. And no, that’s not my way of saying I’m going to go through and curse out my 1- and 2-star reviewers. That’s just self-destructive and pointless. There’s some genuinely interesting stuff here.
The first is from James, a three-star review from December 11, 2019. And James titles his review “An anti-capitalist allegory?”, and he asks:
on one level this is just a YA horror story but is just ok. On another reading it could be an allegory about how capitalism – the Mill – devours and kills entire populations and how its evils have to be challenged in the same way that good challenges evil generally. On the other hand maybe its just wishful thinking on my part ?
Well James, the truth is, when I first started writing this story way back in 2003 or so, I was very young, not long out of college, and didn’t really understand the broader context of capitalism’s ongoing war against the very workers that make it function, though I’m sure that if you’d asked me at the time, I would have told you that I did.
What I did understand was that I had grown up in a mill town, and the mills were horrible. I hated them. They ate lives. I knew people who had lost fingers to the machines, which sounds like something out of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Sometimes I would hear the adults talking about someone who had actually died, or worse (what’s worse? Well, the poor woman still hasn’t woken up…).
But even if you escaped all that – which, to be fair, was much more common – it was still the kind of work that wore you down to nothing over a life of pointless, hopeless, backbreaking drudgery. Sure, some people might rise in the hierarchy to become foremen or managers, but how many? And how much better was that really?
It was widely, though tacitly, understood that The Mill was the Hell you went to if you weren’t good in school. But as with the religious Hell, many people had already resigned themselves to the fact they were going there, and just enjoyed the time they had left before they went. Thus much teenage drinking and pot smoking, accompanied by much unprotected teenage sex, often while drunk or stoned, resulting in much teenage pregnancy.
What shocks me, twenty-odd years later, is that people look back on this as the good old days. Mostly because the things that were so horrible then have been replaced with nothing. Three of the four mills have been closed, and at the fourth, you no longer have five people operating one machine but one person operating five machines…and that one person is a college-educated computer operator, not a blue collar laborer with a strong back. Most of the town is being automated right out of existence.
So I guess what I’m saying, James, is that Hometown is not an allegory about capitalism. It is a fictionalized retelling of one small, local example of it.
So. That was bleak. How about a more fun one before we sign off. This one comes from gunlord, who gave me a five-star review on February 14, 2020.
It’s a rather long review, but in it, gunlord says:
despite the story being set in the 90s, it really gave me an 80s horror feel
Well gunlord, the fact is, the Eighties lingered a long way into the Nineties out in the small towns. I graduated in 1995, and my senior yearbook is full of girls with that characteristic wall o’hair you get when you attempt Eighties Hair without professional help. So when you say Hometown looks like the Eighties despite being set in the Nineties…that’s what it was really like.
Anyway, this is starting to run long, so I think that’s enough for now. Check out Hometown, and if you like it, please leave a review of your own!