Books › Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
664 pages
A surreal, tech-infused urban fantasy where the ghosts of a deeply weird childhood collide with the gritty reality of building a utopian future.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like walking through a gentrifying bohemian neighborhood where the graffiti might actually be magic and the local hackers are building utopia out of dumpster parts. It balances a deeply unsettling, surreal exploration of childhood trauma with an earnest, almost utopian passion for open-source technology and community building. The narrative moves at a steady, deliberate pace, treating its most bizarre magical realism elements with a grounded, matter-of-fact sincerity. It is a gritty, hopeful, and profoundly weird experience that will delight readers who appreciate urban fantasy that isn't afraid to get its hands dirty with both soldering iron flux and the messy, painful work of healing from the past.
- Mood
- surreal
- gritty
- bohemian
- unsettling
- Tone
- matter-of-fact
- earnest
- quirky
- melancholic
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- escaping toxic family dynamics · magic of urban infrastructure · technological utopianism · healing from childhood trauma
- The writing
- The prose treats the utterly absurd and the deeply mundane with the exact same level of grounded, descriptive sincerity.
- The arc
- The protagonist moves from compartmentalized denial about his traumatic past toward a messy but liberating acceptance of his own agency and chosen community.
- Who it's for
- Readers who love a blend of hardcore tech-geekery and unapologetic, weird-fiction magical realism.
Content notes
- child abuse
- fratricide
- body horror
- domestic violence themes
About the book
Alan is a middle-aged entrepreneur in contemporary Toronto, who has devoted himself to fixing up a house in a bohemian neighborhood. This naturally brings him in contact with the house full of students and layabouts next door, including a young woman who, in a moment of stress, reveals to him that she has wings--wings, moreover, which grow back after each attempt to cut them off.
Alan understands. He himself has a secret or two. His father is a mountain; his mother is a washing machine; and among his brothers are a set of Russian nesting dolls.
Now two of the three nesting dolls, Edward and Frederick, are on his doorstep--well on their way to starvation, because their innermost member, George, has vanished. It appears that yet another brother, Davey, who Alan and his other siblings killed years ago, may have returned...bent on revenge.
Under such circumstances it seems only reasonable for Alan to involve himself with a visionary scheme to blanket Toronto with free wireless Internet connectivity, a conspiracy spearheaded by a brilliant technopunk who builds miracles of hardware from parts scavenged from the city's dumpsters. But Alan's past won't leave him alone--and Davey is only one of the powers gunning for him and all his friends.
Description from Open Library.
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