Delinquents and Other Escape Attempts

<p><strong>When you're trapped in a Rust Belt town time passes or it doesn't.</strong> The people of Westinghouse Ohio know this better than most. In <em>Delinquents</em> their personal worlds expand and collapse in on themselves as they battle addictions build scrap-metal rocket ships and tether themselves to plans that will either get them out of dodge or blow up in their faces.</p><p><br></p><p>A former Deadhead seeks sobriety in his hometown though his decades-old childhood trauma has been exhumed and now awaits him. A sometimes-recovering addict asks his younger sister to put him up as he repairs cars in their yard and she scrabbles to keep her own sanity. A woman intending to follow her boyfriend out of town wonders why a newcomer in Westinghouse has captured her latent interest.</p><p><br></p><p>Nick Rees Gardner's linked stories portray people as they are: alternately hilarious desperate resilient broken. For the characters contained in <em>Delinquents</em> the crux is determining which they'll be when the music stops.</p>