Delinquents and Other Escape Attempts

by Nick Rees Gardner

When you're trapped in a Rust Belt town, time passes or it doesn't. The people of Westinghouse, Ohio know this better than most. In DELINQUENTS, their personal worlds expand and collapse in on themselves as they battle addictions, build scrap-metal rocket ships, and tether themselves to plans that will either get them out of dodge or blow up in their faces. A former Deadhead seeks sobriety in his hometown, though his decades-old childhood trauma has been exhumed and now awaits him. A sometimes-recovering addict asks his younger sister to put him up as he repairs cars in their yard and she scrabbles to keep her own sanity. A woman intending to follow her boyfriend out of town wonders why a newcomer in Westinghouse has captured her latent interest. Nick Rees Gardner's linked stories portray people as they are: alternately hilarious, desperate, resilient, broken. For the characters contained in DELINQUENTS, the crux is determining which they'll be when the music stops.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

182 pages, Paperback

Published August 13, 2024

About the author

Nick Gardner is a writer, critic, writing teacher, and beer and wine buyer. His books include, So Marvelously Far, (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2019), an accounting of addiction and recovery in the Rustbelt; and Hurricane Trinity (Unsolicited Press, 2023), a climate change novella. His linked story collection, Delinquents, is forthcoming in August 2024 from Madrona Books. He’s received support from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, the De Groot Foundation, and DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. He lives in Ohio and Washington, DC.

Reviews

[Morgan Talty · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is linked fiction flexing its muscles. The stories here carry the power of the form and together create the spine of the human condition into which this book reaches.

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delinquents and Other Escape Attempts was the perfect book to follow Joshua Mohr's Saint the Terrifying. The drug addiction and personal redemption theme was especially strong with this one!

Instead of the LA punk scene, in these interconnected stories Nick's characters were just spinning their wheels in a small Rust Belt town, surviving day by day, through a series of parties, rehabs, recoveries, and relapses.

They get their hands on a blueprint of a rocket ship and try to build one of their own to escape their addictions. They trade pills to seek better highs, or decide enough's enough and try to get clean. They couch crash broke and penniless, or they 9-5 it for as long as they can and try to keep what's left of their sanity. They attempt to leave their hometown, only to find themselves pulled back in. Time passes or it doesn't.

Nick writes with such authenticity and familiarity - we all knew people like this. Or maybe we were people like this. Broken people, sad people, fucked up in the head people, people who wanted more from the world, from their town, from their lives...

[Patrycja · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid 4.5.

I think it was a great portrayal of subject matter. Sometimes it felt like Kerouac tale, if Kerouac lived during opioid crisis.

Highlights ( limited edition of review, those won’t be appearing a lot in the future, they have guest appearance because I was reading ebook, and there is not a lot of them)
‘Westinghouse was the type of small town where idealists like themselves could afford not to make it.
‘…heroin high as fixing something broken without the pain of having to heal’
‘The key wasn’t to rid yourself of the past. That was impossible, but to reshape the narrative.’
‘Too old to be up late, unemployed and soul-searching with twenty-six-year-olds. Even if they’re old souls. Even if Dunk is bored by people his own age with their retirements and insurance plans. But then again, what is age but whatever fragments of wisdom you pick up along the way? It’s what you take with you and what you leave behind.’
‘He can take the Westinghouse he’s always known, the Westinghouse with cults and whippings and guilt and drugs, and he can transform it into a garden filled with sustenance, a bask in a spontaneous sun. And that’s the difference between himself and Mara, between now and when he ran away. Now he can also, just as easily, stay.’
‚We’ll figure it out. We need to, and we’ll use that need like a drug.’

[Kyle Seibel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ambitious, sprawling, empathic, and somehow also a photo-realistic panorama of a town that does not exist, these linked stories are the clear result of an accomplished and singular creative vision. Gardner blends the grittiness of dirty realism with an almost Dickensian flair for characters and scenes. Additionally, the book itself is a solid product, which is not a guarantee in indie releases. Favorite stories: “Sever the Head,” and “Digging.” A beautiful collection, inside and out.

[Annie · Rating 4 out of 5]

DELINQUENTS AND OTHER ESCAPE ATTEMPTS by Nick Rees Gardner is an honest, darkly humorous and raw collection of linked stories that explores the harsh realities of life in Westinghouse, a fictional Rust Belt town during the opioid crisis.

In interconnected vignettes and stories which reminded me of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio story cycle, Gardner captures the alienation and isolation of these townspeople. They struggle with unemployment, family crises, addiction and rampant drug access in a chaotic minefield of parties, rehabs, recovery and relapses. In Westinghouse, lives consist of attempts to escape—from building a rocket ship of metal scrap to cross-country drug runs or trading pills for the next high or striving for sobriety.

Gardner’s visceral prose immerses readers in experience of becoming trapped in cycles of self destruction. There’s an astonishing sequence of 24 vignettes titled “Spit Backs” with an endless series of subtitles like Recovery, Withdrawal, Recovery, Relapse, Recovery, Relapse, Recovery, Overdose, Recovery and on and on and on. The characters’ relentless quest for release, survival and escape is profoundly human and devastating.

DELINQUENTS is a melancholic, wry, pessimistic yet ultimately uplifting ode to the fragile bonds that tie the people of Westinghouse together and the searing pain that pulses beneath the surface of small-town life, not just in Ohio or the Rust Belt. This book made me see addiction in a new light and really feel how small-town life has been forever changed by the opioid crisis. It left me both deeply sad for our country and hopeful for the resilience of the human spirit to recover against all odds.

Many thanks to Madrona Books, a small PNW publisher, for sending me a galley.

[Lydia Scheel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I will be recommending this to all Ohio transplants I meet in DC 🙂‍↕️ Reading this tugged me into a nostalgic melancholy. In some ways this book felt like it was recasting tales remembered by your cousin, ringing with authenticity, but lacking some of the finer description and place setting that would have made Westinghouse real for me. The novella was easily my favorite, as it felt the most fully fleshed. Throughout the book, the writing was intentional and interesting, but I found myself mired by the dialogue running up against the prose. Why is it that so many authors now abandon quotation marks? I also liked that there were characters mentioned between stories, but as a device it didn’t make too much of a difference. The strongest thread was the will to cope.

[Philip Reari · Rating 5 out of 5]

Delinquents immediately gripped me with its lively prose and questing characters. All that wanting and not knowing and yearning seeped under my skin and with each successive story I felt closer to the action, both internal and lived through. Gardner takes hold of a certain place and time—small town Ohio in the early 21st century—and hits the reader in the face with it.

[Avi Paulson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very sad but well written

[Alison · Rating 5 out of 5]

You will be pulled into the lives and thoughts of these characters from the very first sentence.

This is not a gritty and dirty book about addiction that makes you tsk and rubberneck at lives you can’t understand. It’s a poignant and reflective book about addicts as authentic, multi-layered people you can believe in and relate to.

[Leila Siddiqui · Rating 5 out of 5]

What stayed with me is how Westinghouse functions less like a backdrop and more like a gravitational field that keeps pulling characters back into the same cycles of motion and stasis. The linked stories give the sense of repeated escape attempts that never fully detach from the town itself, so even ambition carries a residue of return.

I was especially struck by the tonal balance between absurd invention and emotional erosion. Scrap metal rocket ships sit alongside addiction recovery, family strain, and stalled relationships, and the collection refuses to smooth those shifts into a stable register. The structure matters because characters and situations echo across stories, making it clear that individual choices are constantly shaped by a shared environment that resists clean exits.

This will resonate with readers who are drawn to Rust Belt fiction and character driven short story collections that focus on survival rather than resolution. By the end, the book feels less interested in whether escape is possible and more interested in what people become while trying to keep attempting it.

[Jim Roberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best things I can say after finishing a book is, “I can’t stop thinking about it.” Delinquents and Other Escape Attempts is such a book. Nick Rees Gardner, in his debut collection of short fiction, delivers eight short stories and a novella that deep dive into the opioid crisis in the American Midwest. His characters are beautiful losers, and we feel their angst and sorrow and regret as they run endlessly on that infernal–almost inescapable–loop from addiction to recovery to relapse. These are expertly crafted stories with immensely believable characters cast in gorgeous and heartbreaking prose, characters you care about and root for their escape from the drug-drenched, rust-bucket fictional town of Westinghouse, Ohio. A place just as broken and grasping at hope as they are.

[Jason Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was very impressed and caught up in these tales by Nick R. Gardner. It was often disturbing and emotionally draining. However, there always seemed to be some beacon that a character was able to follow to seek a life beyond addiction and the traumas that sometimes lead to it. One passage—if it is alright for me to quote from his novella Captain Failure—exhibits his powerful writing:

"Dunk focused on his soda water. The bubbles danced each time he jostled the glass, their pattern, seemingly random, but defined by the universe, by the natural law of the Earth that makes chemical meet with chemical...it wasn't some cosmic accident. He could fight or he could trust the flow, drift with it...All these forces shook the glass and Dunk hoped not to spill over, fizz out."

[Nykera · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author immerses you into the world but it's the real world, not a fantasy. It's uncomfortable, sweaty, uncertain and desperate. It's perfect for what it is but I don't want to be there. It is meta and gritty. There is no way to romanticize the people in these situations. In this book, there is almost a self-referential way of saying this is as good as it gets. THIS is the romanticized version so imagine how much the reality sucks. It took me out of my reality and put me in a reality I'm not used to. It's a good book!

[Téa Franco · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was absolutely AMAZING! Gardner does a brilliant job at creating characters that we are rooting for, despite the bad things many of them do. Never in my life have I read a book that portrays people suffering from addiction in such a nuanced and empathetic light. It was at times funny, sometimes gritty, and always left me thinking. I could read this collection over and over again.

[Jenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous writing about heartbreakingly human characters. I loved the interconnected structure and Gardner's prose.

[Kirah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delinquents was the best story! I adored it

[Joey Hedger · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is stunning. I couldn’t put it down. Loved Captain Failure especially!

[paige frankenfield · Rating 4 out of 5]

def a new type of book for me and for that i’m happy

wrote with raw emotion that you can feel on every page

[DIRTBAG · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection is so damn good, one the best reads of last year (along with D.T. Robbins' Leasing). Cannot recommend enough.