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Niagara Falls, NY
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 9, 2024
“I don’t think you are supposed to look at a father’s face for very long,” Ric Royer is thinking as he’s driving in the car with his dad, trying not to stare at the Bandaid half-hanging from his neck.
Niagara Falls, N.Y. has all the camp of the film Buffalo 66, and Royer’s parents are every bit as strange as Vincent Gallo’s movie parents. They are divorced, and the only reason his father stops by is to fix things and to drop off sausages. In fact, Royer’s father leaves him with a gift on picking him up at the bus station: A bag of frozen thumb-sized “red hots,” which Ric ends up having to carry around in his backpack for the next several hours.
Ric had gone home to Niagara Falls to research an article for the Western New York Heritage Magazine on the utopian dreams of the turn of the 20th Century, like the planned 46-story “Great Dynamic Palace” and the “Metropolis” supercity. But it was William T. Love’s “Model City” that would end up breaking the back of the town on the Canadian border. Love broke ground to build the canal that would divert the Niagara River to his project city, but the work stopped after a series of financial calamities. Eventually, the land would be sold to a company that would dump poison chemicals into Love Canal and turn it into the first Superfund site.
“Nothing does nothing quite like Niagara Falls,” Royer writes, and this sentence seems to sum up the existential crisis he goes through on returning home. As the three-week deadline approaches for his story submission, Ric finds a room at the Enjoy Hotel, as the due date goes into overtime. It feels like the septic canal is fueling his dreams. Goblins are living on the other side of a makeshift cardboard closet door.
The book starts to feel like the film of the making of a late homework dream. Ric is living in a borderland liminal state, perambulating miles a day to find food in the middle of the Covid pandemic. This, on top of the normal isolation and emptiness of the Niagara landscape, is felt powerfully in the narrative dreamscape Royer sends sweeping down the city streets in gusts of solitude.
The plain cover of Niagara Falls, N.Y. belies the cream-filled center lying in wait inside. This magical realist travelogue goes off into surreal jaunts without warning. This is a dreamy book. While I learned quite a bit about the Niagara Falls area, which I’ve only visited once in my life, I also found the book to be honest, captivating, funny and perverse.
I highly recommend this book.
Niagara Falls, N.Y. has all the camp of the film Buffalo 66, and Royer’s parents are every bit as strange as Vincent Gallo’s movie parents. They are divorced, and the only reason his father stops by is to fix things and to drop off sausages. In fact, Royer’s father leaves him with a gift on picking him up at the bus station: A bag of frozen thumb-sized “red hots,” which Ric ends up having to carry around in his backpack for the next several hours.
Ric had gone home to Niagara Falls to research an article for the Western New York Heritage Magazine on the utopian dreams of the turn of the 20th Century, like the planned 46-story “Great Dynamic Palace” and the “Metropolis” supercity. But it was William T. Love’s “Model City” that would end up breaking the back of the town on the Canadian border. Love broke ground to build the canal that would divert the Niagara River to his project city, but the work stopped after a series of financial calamities. Eventually, the land would be sold to a company that would dump poison chemicals into Love Canal and turn it into the first Superfund site.
“Nothing does nothing quite like Niagara Falls,” Royer writes, and this sentence seems to sum up the existential crisis he goes through on returning home. As the three-week deadline approaches for his story submission, Ric finds a room at the Enjoy Hotel, as the due date goes into overtime. It feels like the septic canal is fueling his dreams. Goblins are living on the other side of a makeshift cardboard closet door.
The book starts to feel like the film of the making of a late homework dream. Ric is living in a borderland liminal state, perambulating miles a day to find food in the middle of the Covid pandemic. This, on top of the normal isolation and emptiness of the Niagara landscape, is felt powerfully in the narrative dreamscape Royer sends sweeping down the city streets in gusts of solitude.
The plain cover of Niagara Falls, N.Y. belies the cream-filled center lying in wait inside. This magical realist travelogue goes off into surreal jaunts without warning. This is a dreamy book. While I learned quite a bit about the Niagara Falls area, which I’ve only visited once in my life, I also found the book to be honest, captivating, funny and perverse.
I highly recommend this book.
April 30, 2024
Not since Doris Lessing's Briefing for a Descent into Hell has an author so deftly dissolved place into psyche. We float past utopian hucksters and over the falls in a barrel, into the pits of reality, and well beyond. Did I mention that the book contains oceans of cock? (Well, I did now.)
July 24, 2024
When I was finished with this, I simply put the novella inside of my trash. I don’t want it on my shelves, I won’t ever recommend it to anyone, ever. I forced myself to finish it despite the errors and page jumping.
You aren’t unique because you’re from Western NY.
You aren’t unique because you’re from Western NY.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews