The Joy Divisions

<p>The year is 1993 and art-school dropout Ed Pullman has returned home to work as a janitor in Allentown Pennsylvania-the enigmatic nexus where goth kids coffeeshop culture and sultry drag queens collide with neo-Nazis the dying textiles industry and an unsettling commune led by an aspiring cult leader named Tod Griffon. As Ed and his loving cousin Ester struggle to find their place in a bleakly earnest landscape of guerrilla conceptual art post-NAFTA labor battles and burning factories their hometown marches stoically toward a disaster of biblical proportions. With its vivid and original recreation of a place and time that is both utterly real and surprisingly magical Scott Dimovitz's grittily nostalgic debut novel is a sensitively imagined fable about an unsuspecting world on the cusp of massive change.</p>