A01=Chris Erickson
american folklore
Author_Chris Erickson
Category=FB
Category=FBA
Category=FXR
eccentric characters
eq_bestseller
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_modern-contemporary
eq_nobargain
for fans of weird Americana
humor
interconnected stories
literary fiction
Midwest
midwestern
midwestern gothic
novella
oral history
rural magical realism
small town fiction
small town lives
strange stories
tall tales
Product details
- ISBN 9781938603334
- Dimensions: 158 x 158mm
- Publication Date: 18 Sep 2025
- Publisher: Dzanc Books
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
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.
Chris Erickson is from Decatur, Illinois. His debut novella Henrytown is forthcoming on Graver Goods Press, an imprint of Dzanc Books, in 2025. His writing has appeared in The American Reader, Gigantic, Action Spectacle, Capilano Review, Seneca Review, PANK, benmarcus.com, and The Hobo-Tramp Voice. He has performed in a number of venues, including E. Claire Raley Studios for the Performing Arts, Third Space Art Collective, Literary Death Match - Los Angeles, John Natsoulas Center for the Arts, Sacramento Poetry Center, and Slatter's Court. He is a graduate of the UC Davis Creative Writing Program, and still lives in Davis, CA.
