Lin Codega’s debut novel grabs both it’s lead and the reader from the first page, sprinting hand-in-hand into the terror and misdirecting calm of company towns. Everyone is everyone else’s business, lives lived on top of each other on a foundation of familial history, generational grudges and expectation. They’re places of paradox: calm and frantic, complicated and very simple. You feel you know each of these characters as soon as they’re introduced; within a chapter you see the complimentary mess they make of their lives. None of these folks are what you’d call rounded, because rounded implies neatness — each has a ragged edge, quilted together by proximity but uniquely their own.
Motheater by Lin Codega
Interstitials: David Lynch‘s weird magnificence
Playout: We All Lift Together by Keith Power from Warframe