Henrytown by Chris Erickson
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 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.
Publication Date: August 5, 2025
Hardback
ISBN: 9781938603334
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 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.
Publication Date: August 5, 2025
Hardback
ISBN: 9781938603334
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 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.
Publication Date: August 5, 2025
Hardback
ISBN: 9781938603334
PRAISE FOR henrytown
"A woman named Lady Button who fashions herself a cape of sex toys; the town mayor, who brushes his teeth so hard he wears off the enamel; his wife, Pilar Kusnetsov, who gives birth to twenty-eight children; 'One Actual Local Geezer Named Misty,' who, in one day, walks across the entire community to traverse the line between good and bad actors–these are but a few of the delightful characters in Henrytown, a nonlinear narrative which leaves one gasping at the power of the short burst woven into the larger tapestry. The cohesion of these dozens of disparate characters is testament to Chris Erickson’s ability to distill the essence of human quirk into one narrative that makes the heart ache and sing, all at the same time. Henrytown ushers in an exciting new voice in experimental literature."
—Jacinda Townsend, author of Trigger Warning
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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.
