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The Perfume Factory
Bukowski, Fante and Salinger intersect when Sam, who has grown up in a faded Jersey resort whose kids use the town’s toxic dump as their playground, meets city-bred Julie. Sam tells wild lies about himself to heighten Julie’s interest. As the fabric of his false identity shreds and Julie slips away, Sam is lured into an ambitious robbery, whose violent end will shape Sam’s future.
227 pages, Paperback
Published December 12, 2018
3 people are currently reading
28 people want to read
About the author
Alex Austin
29 books132 followersI was born in New Jersey and grew up on the Jersey Shore, where I spent much of my childhood underwater. My little town on the Raritan Bay, Union Beach, flooded every full moon, but the bay and creeks were my element. I spent many a day six feet beneath the surface trying to extract oxygen from water (Aquaman and I share the secret). After coming up for air, I did a tour in the U.S. Navy (on the water!). That done, I moved to California and attended UCLA, where I got a BA in history, but by then my interests had turned to less academic writing—both fiction and nonfiction. I've written in most forms, but for the last 20 years, I've stuck to novels. My latest, End Man, was published by Cursed Dragon Press and released October 2022. The novel took six years and went through more than 200 complete revisions. It's about our online and data-soaked times, but to make it work I had to set it 10 years in the future. It has very much to do with ChatGPT. When I'm not writing, I'm reading. I live in Los Angeles.
“End Man has echoes of Bladerunner, Max Payne and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Noir vibes, an outnumbered, outgunned hero and an impending sense of paranoia. It sends you into a future with a disturbing vision of how our data could be used.”
—Luke French, Reedsy Discovery
"Alex Austin is a master at building tension, psychological inquiry, and intrigue that tests his protagonist in unexpected ways."--Diane Donovan, Midwest Book Review
“Evocative and thought-provoking, End Man by Alex Austin is an extraordinary science-fiction tale that paints a disturbing futuristic picture of a technologically advanced society. ”—Susan Sewell for Readers’ Favorite
"An engrossing and well-crafted SF Tale with timely themes."—Kirkus Reviews Recommended
"Fast and fresh, End Man is a blood-pumping thriller like nothing you’ve experienced before!"
—Indies Today
“End Man is an exciting cyberpunk novel that creates a fully realized and compelling world for a fascinating protagonist to exist in.”—Literary Titan
“This is a well-written and gripping dystopian thriller, thoughtful and complex, that will appeal to sci-fi and mystery fans alike.” –Steph Warren, Bookshine and Readbows.
“I enjoyed this book through and through. . .The characters were one of a kind and the whole plot line impeccably well thought out.”—Victoria Luv
----
I'm a Los Angeles-based journalist and teacher (LAUSD). My novel End Man, a speculative mystery published by Cursed Dragon Ship, was released on October, 11, 2022. First sentence: "Death was a good place to hide." Bookish Beyond has published a persuasive review: https://bookishbeyond.com/index.php/2...
I've given several interviews in conjunction with End Man's release. You'll learn of my humble Jersey roots, how End Man emerged from an online epiphany, and why I caution those who contemplate writing novels:
https://heatherlbarksdale.com/author-...
https://twitter.com/_armedwithabook/s...
My novel Nakamura Reality was published by The Permanent Press in February 2016. Publishers Weekly gave the novel a starred review and called it "powerful and moving. The following are links to some reviews, interviews and published stories:
Publishers Weekly Starred Review of Nakamura Reality http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1...
Better Beta Reads Interview http://betterbetareads.com/bookmarksi...
Night Swim (excerpted from Nakamura Reality)
http://web.archive.org/web/2012090117...
UV30 (excerpted from Nakamura Reality)
http://carte-blanche.org/articles/uv-30/
The Rat (Nominated for Best of the Web 2015)
http://districtlit.com/post/12
“End Man has echoes of Bladerunner, Max Payne and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Noir vibes, an outnumbered, outgunned hero and an impending sense of paranoia. It sends you into a future with a disturbing vision of how our data could be used.”
—Luke French, Reedsy Discovery
"Alex Austin is a master at building tension, psychological inquiry, and intrigue that tests his protagonist in unexpected ways."--Diane Donovan, Midwest Book Review
“Evocative and thought-provoking, End Man by Alex Austin is an extraordinary science-fiction tale that paints a disturbing futuristic picture of a technologically advanced society. ”—Susan Sewell for Readers’ Favorite
"An engrossing and well-crafted SF Tale with timely themes."—Kirkus Reviews Recommended
"Fast and fresh, End Man is a blood-pumping thriller like nothing you’ve experienced before!"
—Indies Today
“End Man is an exciting cyberpunk novel that creates a fully realized and compelling world for a fascinating protagonist to exist in.”—Literary Titan
“This is a well-written and gripping dystopian thriller, thoughtful and complex, that will appeal to sci-fi and mystery fans alike.” –Steph Warren, Bookshine and Readbows.
“I enjoyed this book through and through. . .The characters were one of a kind and the whole plot line impeccably well thought out.”—Victoria Luv
----
I'm a Los Angeles-based journalist and teacher (LAUSD). My novel End Man, a speculative mystery published by Cursed Dragon Ship, was released on October, 11, 2022. First sentence: "Death was a good place to hide." Bookish Beyond has published a persuasive review: https://bookishbeyond.com/index.php/2...
I've given several interviews in conjunction with End Man's release. You'll learn of my humble Jersey roots, how End Man emerged from an online epiphany, and why I caution those who contemplate writing novels:
https://heatherlbarksdale.com/author-...
https://twitter.com/_armedwithabook/s...
My novel Nakamura Reality was published by The Permanent Press in February 2016. Publishers Weekly gave the novel a starred review and called it "powerful and moving. The following are links to some reviews, interviews and published stories:
Publishers Weekly Starred Review of Nakamura Reality http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1...
Better Beta Reads Interview http://betterbetareads.com/bookmarksi...
Night Swim (excerpted from Nakamura Reality)
http://web.archive.org/web/2012090117...
UV30 (excerpted from Nakamura Reality)
http://carte-blanche.org/articles/uv-30/
The Rat (Nominated for Best of the Web 2015)
http://districtlit.com/post/12
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 25, 2009
The Perfume Factory is an absorbing coming-of-age story set on the gritty coastline of central New Jersey. The novel springs from the corrosive relationship between a violent, abusive father and his rebellious but powerless son, who suffers from an undiagnosed disorder that renders him physically helpless when taken by strong emotions. The son, Sam, is not without resources. Like others who have found themselves impotent in a hellish environment, Sam has survived by suppressing his feelings and emotions. Sam has deflected a thousand blows by playing it cool.
Sam's father is a monster, a cross between Pat Conroy's hard-nosed Marine Corps officer Santini (The Great Santini), and the sadistic stepfather Dwight of Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life. A perennially out-of-work alcoholic, with a taste for classical music, Frank relives his military glory days by barking orders at Sam and perversely berating his every attempt to fulfill them. Not helping matters is Sam's mother, a good-hearted but wayward and combative woman who can match Frank's verbal outbursts with a fountain of foul language, but whose defense of Sam serves as a red flag for Frank's abusive attentions.
Given his dysfunctional parentage, Sam seems set-up to be a thoroughly sympathetic character, but Austin has avoided making Sam the staple of coming-of-age novels, the "good bad boy." Morally rudderless, Sam is a thief, liar and con man, whose has bankrolled his coolness, street smarts and raw intelligence into a string of lucrative petty crimes, including the most recent, a break-in that has provided Sam the money to escape from his father and a second monster, Sam's hometown.
Port Beach is a faded resort where the children's playground is a polluted bay and a garbage dump that spreads across the town`s marshland like a cancer. Taverns outnumber grocery stores 20 to 1, unemployment is astronomical and hope is in short supply. Most ominous is the town's one source of jobs, the Perfume Factory, an industrial complex that "... spilled out the sickly sweet odors that made Port Beach smell like the bottom of an old woman's handbag," an irony not lost on Sam, who views the Perfume Factory as a mocking reminder of the town's unchanging ugliness, oppression and empty promises.
On the night we meet Sam, he's nearing his 18th birthday, and finalizing his plans for escape, but this night will prove pivotal. Cruising the shore, Sam and Leo, a tough, worldly, middle-class friend, meet Julie, a pretty, vivacious young woman from the city, miles above Sam in sophistication, who takes an unexpected interest in him, heightened by the lies he tells about himself to match Leo's authentic resume. Though the night ends with a falling out between Sam and Julie, Sam obsessively pursues her, setting aside his habitual caution, altering his escape plans, and experiencing his first romantic love and sexual experience, pain and joy in tow. Sam's efforts to keep the world of Julie and the world of Port Beach and his father separate provide some much appreciated comic relief from the dominant, harsher scenes of the novel. It's also through his efforts to move between these parallel universes, that Sam grows as a character, finding a moral compass and discovering his own identity, even as both worlds collapse.
A novel of social realism, in the camp of Frank McCord, Jim Harrison and Pat Conroy, and its subset, dirty realism, a term coined to describe the works of American novelists Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff and Jayne Anne Phillips, The Perfume Factory uses a matter-of-fact tone, blunt, realistic dialogue and graphic descriptions of violence and grim, small-town life to reflect Sam's world. But the above are threaded with lyrical descriptions revealing an introspective, poetic streak in Sam that grows with the story's unfolding, like the following description of a night with Julie: "With the darkness came the fireflies, which Julie wanted to catch and put in a jar. We ran around the yard, cupping them and depositing them in the jar until we had thirty or forty. But though they continued to glow in the jar, the magic had gone out of their light and what started as a quest for something extraordinary turned solemn. Julie opened the jar and shook them out. As they spread across the night, I watched her face, lost for a moment in their flight and regained magic."
Numerous colorful, inventive characters inhabit Austin's central New Jersey setting, but Austin shortchanges us with several of them, including Sam's siblings, who are intriguing but not fleshed out or fully integrated into the novel. However, several characters who briefly come on stage leave indelible impressions. Archler, who buys the underage kids liquor, "... smelled of smoke, which had soaked into the two gray sweaters that he took turns wearing. He walked with a limp, favoring his right leg. There may have been a time that he didn't limp, but no one could remember it, nor had anyone bothered to ask how his lameness had come about. The limp didn't reduce his pace, though, and when he walked, he always had his lips set in a smile that never varied, as if it were painted. What he was smiling at was anybody's guess.... After graduating eighth grade, he had gone to high school for awhile, everyone was sure of that, but no one was sure when he dropped out. I followed him out of Jack's, wondering at his hair, which was black as a pocket comb, jelled and parted in the middle and never varied in length, though no one had ever seen Archler at the barber's. Archler was a mystery that nobody cared to solve."
The Perfume Factory's local is specific, the time frame is unspecified. It could be the sixties, it could be the nineties, perhaps a strategy to emphasize the unchanging nature of the small, blue-collar towns in which the story takes place. Against this setting, Sam, disaffected, distrustful, disillusioned, brings to mind the working class youth that have appeared in British fiction, plays and rock music, from John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger, to Scottish novelist Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, to the songs of British rockers The Clash, Sex Pistols and Squeeze (and closer to home, Bruce Springsteen). The Sex Pistol's Johnny Rotten sang, "No future for you or me," which resonates in Sam's search for employment: ".... After going to a dozen or so places, I saw that no matter how big they [factories:] were or what they manufactured, the offices that you applied in were all the same. Maybe fifteen feet wide, with a little couch and fake wood walls. In the fourth wall, they'd cut a hole to shove the application through and behind the hole a row of women my mother's age tapped out stuff on typewriters. On the walls would always be a couple of government notices in small type and a poster advertising government bonds, as if maybe one wall was given over to the government. A fluorescent light would always be blinking as if it were about to go out. The woman that stuck her hand through the hole to take the application would have horned rim glasses and her hair bunched on top and she'd be smoking. She wouldn't say anything when she handed you the application pinned to a brown board with a pencil, and she wouldn't say anything when you handed it back. The first couple of places I applied to, I asked what would happen next, and they always said they'd call if they thought I was right for the job. I stopped asking after awhile. Sometimes behind the walls, I'd hear noises, lathes running or the sound of a conveyer belt, and I'd imagine what was going on back there, but that was as close as I got to the work."
A first novel, The Perfume Factory is notable for its strong sense of place and stamp of authenticity, and timeless in its evocation of monstrous fathers and hapless sons. Sam will navigate through some harrowing seas to leave his father and the Perfume Factory behind. Brave readers will accompany him.
Sam's father is a monster, a cross between Pat Conroy's hard-nosed Marine Corps officer Santini (The Great Santini), and the sadistic stepfather Dwight of Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life. A perennially out-of-work alcoholic, with a taste for classical music, Frank relives his military glory days by barking orders at Sam and perversely berating his every attempt to fulfill them. Not helping matters is Sam's mother, a good-hearted but wayward and combative woman who can match Frank's verbal outbursts with a fountain of foul language, but whose defense of Sam serves as a red flag for Frank's abusive attentions.
Given his dysfunctional parentage, Sam seems set-up to be a thoroughly sympathetic character, but Austin has avoided making Sam the staple of coming-of-age novels, the "good bad boy." Morally rudderless, Sam is a thief, liar and con man, whose has bankrolled his coolness, street smarts and raw intelligence into a string of lucrative petty crimes, including the most recent, a break-in that has provided Sam the money to escape from his father and a second monster, Sam's hometown.
Port Beach is a faded resort where the children's playground is a polluted bay and a garbage dump that spreads across the town`s marshland like a cancer. Taverns outnumber grocery stores 20 to 1, unemployment is astronomical and hope is in short supply. Most ominous is the town's one source of jobs, the Perfume Factory, an industrial complex that "... spilled out the sickly sweet odors that made Port Beach smell like the bottom of an old woman's handbag," an irony not lost on Sam, who views the Perfume Factory as a mocking reminder of the town's unchanging ugliness, oppression and empty promises.
On the night we meet Sam, he's nearing his 18th birthday, and finalizing his plans for escape, but this night will prove pivotal. Cruising the shore, Sam and Leo, a tough, worldly, middle-class friend, meet Julie, a pretty, vivacious young woman from the city, miles above Sam in sophistication, who takes an unexpected interest in him, heightened by the lies he tells about himself to match Leo's authentic resume. Though the night ends with a falling out between Sam and Julie, Sam obsessively pursues her, setting aside his habitual caution, altering his escape plans, and experiencing his first romantic love and sexual experience, pain and joy in tow. Sam's efforts to keep the world of Julie and the world of Port Beach and his father separate provide some much appreciated comic relief from the dominant, harsher scenes of the novel. It's also through his efforts to move between these parallel universes, that Sam grows as a character, finding a moral compass and discovering his own identity, even as both worlds collapse.
A novel of social realism, in the camp of Frank McCord, Jim Harrison and Pat Conroy, and its subset, dirty realism, a term coined to describe the works of American novelists Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff and Jayne Anne Phillips, The Perfume Factory uses a matter-of-fact tone, blunt, realistic dialogue and graphic descriptions of violence and grim, small-town life to reflect Sam's world. But the above are threaded with lyrical descriptions revealing an introspective, poetic streak in Sam that grows with the story's unfolding, like the following description of a night with Julie: "With the darkness came the fireflies, which Julie wanted to catch and put in a jar. We ran around the yard, cupping them and depositing them in the jar until we had thirty or forty. But though they continued to glow in the jar, the magic had gone out of their light and what started as a quest for something extraordinary turned solemn. Julie opened the jar and shook them out. As they spread across the night, I watched her face, lost for a moment in their flight and regained magic."
Numerous colorful, inventive characters inhabit Austin's central New Jersey setting, but Austin shortchanges us with several of them, including Sam's siblings, who are intriguing but not fleshed out or fully integrated into the novel. However, several characters who briefly come on stage leave indelible impressions. Archler, who buys the underage kids liquor, "... smelled of smoke, which had soaked into the two gray sweaters that he took turns wearing. He walked with a limp, favoring his right leg. There may have been a time that he didn't limp, but no one could remember it, nor had anyone bothered to ask how his lameness had come about. The limp didn't reduce his pace, though, and when he walked, he always had his lips set in a smile that never varied, as if it were painted. What he was smiling at was anybody's guess.... After graduating eighth grade, he had gone to high school for awhile, everyone was sure of that, but no one was sure when he dropped out. I followed him out of Jack's, wondering at his hair, which was black as a pocket comb, jelled and parted in the middle and never varied in length, though no one had ever seen Archler at the barber's. Archler was a mystery that nobody cared to solve."
The Perfume Factory's local is specific, the time frame is unspecified. It could be the sixties, it could be the nineties, perhaps a strategy to emphasize the unchanging nature of the small, blue-collar towns in which the story takes place. Against this setting, Sam, disaffected, distrustful, disillusioned, brings to mind the working class youth that have appeared in British fiction, plays and rock music, from John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger, to Scottish novelist Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, to the songs of British rockers The Clash, Sex Pistols and Squeeze (and closer to home, Bruce Springsteen). The Sex Pistol's Johnny Rotten sang, "No future for you or me," which resonates in Sam's search for employment: ".... After going to a dozen or so places, I saw that no matter how big they [factories:] were or what they manufactured, the offices that you applied in were all the same. Maybe fifteen feet wide, with a little couch and fake wood walls. In the fourth wall, they'd cut a hole to shove the application through and behind the hole a row of women my mother's age tapped out stuff on typewriters. On the walls would always be a couple of government notices in small type and a poster advertising government bonds, as if maybe one wall was given over to the government. A fluorescent light would always be blinking as if it were about to go out. The woman that stuck her hand through the hole to take the application would have horned rim glasses and her hair bunched on top and she'd be smoking. She wouldn't say anything when she handed you the application pinned to a brown board with a pencil, and she wouldn't say anything when you handed it back. The first couple of places I applied to, I asked what would happen next, and they always said they'd call if they thought I was right for the job. I stopped asking after awhile. Sometimes behind the walls, I'd hear noises, lathes running or the sound of a conveyer belt, and I'd imagine what was going on back there, but that was as close as I got to the work."
A first novel, The Perfume Factory is notable for its strong sense of place and stamp of authenticity, and timeless in its evocation of monstrous fathers and hapless sons. Sam will navigate through some harrowing seas to leave his father and the Perfume Factory behind. Brave readers will accompany him.
June 25, 2009
A great coming of age story set in New Jersey. His teen-age characters ring true and won't let you forget them. To read it is to re-awaken your own memories of the joy and pain of growing into adulthood.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews