The Town

by Shaun Prescott

"A powerfully doomy debut" (The Guardian), Shaun Prescott's The Town is a novel of a rural Australian community besieged by modern day anxieties and threatened by a supernatural force seeking to consume the dying town.

This is Australia, an unnamed, dead-end town in the heart of the outback--a desolate place of gas stations, fast-food franchises, and labyrinthine streets: flat and nearly abandoned. When a young writer arrives to research just such depressing middles-of-nowhere as they are choked into oblivion, he finds something more sinister than economic depression: the ghost towns of Australia appear to be literally disappearing. An epidemic of mysterious holes is threatening his new home's very existence, and this discovery plunges the researcher into an abyss of weirdness from which he may never escape.

Dark, slippery and unsettling, Shaun Prescott's debut resurrects the existential novel for the age of sprawl and blight, excavates a nation's buried history of colonial genocide, and tells a love story that asks if outsiders can ever truly belong anywhere. The result is a disquieting classic that vibrates with an occult power.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Magical Realism, Australia, Science Fiction, 21st Century, Audiobook

256 pages, Hardcover

First published December 31, 2017

About the author

Shaun Prescott is a writer based in the Blue Mountains in New South Wales.

Reviews

[Adam Dalva · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book, which has shades of EXIT WEST in how it turns a real world phenomenon (in this case the shrinking towns of the Australian outback) into a surreal allegory. The lead, a researcher and writer, arrives in a small town and, in picaresque fashion, has a sequence of interactions with the numbed residents of the town. Eventually, holes start appearing everywhere, threatening to envelop the town itself. It has the diminishing returns element that you might expect - once the surrealism kicks in, the lack of urgency begins to feel less important. The leads relationship w/ Ciara, an obscure radio host in the town, sparks the most light.

[karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

NOW AVAILABLE!!!

goodreads giveaway AND

fulfilling book riot's 2020 read harder challenge task #10: Read a book that takes place in a rural setting

which describes 89% of what i already read...

***********************************************

this book's description immediately grabbed me by my steve erickson/evan dara-loving tendrils, shouting, KAREN! I AM YOUR HUCKLEBERRY!

Community radio host Ciara receives dozens of unmarked cassette recordings every week and broadcasts them to a listenership of none. Ex-musician Tom drives an impractical bus that no one ever boards. Publican Jenny runs a hotel that has no patrons. Rick wanders the aisles of the Woolworths every day in an attempt to blunt the disappointment of adulthood.

In a town of innumerable petrol stations, labyrinthine cul-de-sac streets, two competing shopping plazas, and ubiquitous drive-thru franchises, where are these people likely to find the truth about their collective past – and can they do so before the town completely disappears?

Shaun Prescott’s debut novel The Town follows an unnamed narrator’s efforts to complete a book about disappeared towns in the Central West of New South Wales. Set in a yet-to-disappear town–a town believed by its inhabitants to have no history at all–the novel traces its characters’ attempts to carve their own identities in a place that is both unyielding and teetering on the edge of oblivion.

this is the kind of slipstreamy, surreal-but-grounded, quasi-apocalyptic, unsettling stuff i love. atmospheric, mind-bendy irreality with overlapping narratives that challenges the reader with ambiguity, multiple interpretations, a slight displacement that lingers long after the story ends. it sounded like it would have touchpoints comparable to The Sea Came in at Midnight and Infinite Jest, with maybe a little Flee, for good measure.

and it was fine, occasionally more than fine, but it just didn't live up to my expectations.

and i'll just come right out and say that i am an asshole american who knows zero about disappeared towns in the central west of new south wales, so the real-world phenomena inspiring the book was a significance completely lost on me, and all i can really respond to is the writing and storyline.

it's about a man researching the disappearing towns in the central west of new south wales. i know i just said that in the paragraph above, but the unnamed narrator does not refrain from repeating that phrase, so neither shall i. the disappearing towns in the central west of new south wales. the disappearing towns in the central west of new south wales. the disappearing towns in the central west of new south wales.

squatting himself down in this disappearing town in the central west of new south wales for research and observation, he meets several of the region's inhabitants; oddballs and loners who are deeply lonely, and they share their stories which he records as the town (in the central west of new south wales) disappears around them.

and many of these stories are affecting and interesting-enough reads, but the overall vibe of this book is...sludgy. when the characters are relaying their stories, it's grand, but the in-between parts are a bit boring and confusing, and while the atmosphere is steve erickson-adjacent; with its tone characterized by a creeping dread of an unknown but inevitable catastrophe—and keeping in mind that i know nothing about aboriginal populations in australia; specifically the wiradjuri people to whom this book is dedicated—for me, the book became a bit tedious and turgid and it took me way to long to get through.

Slumped in the lounge with the bottle between his legs, Rob said it was very painful having a person fall out of love with you. Every day when he woke up, it was only a matter of seconds before he remembered that he was in immense pain. The immense pain did not subside until he passed out that night. Before, he could never have imagined what it would be like to feel so much pain. He had not thought it feasible that this amount of pain could affect one person at any given time. It was simply intolerable. Why did people continue living when this much pain was possible?

so, while i know my ignorance prevented me from appreciating a lot of nuance here, i'm a human person who can relate to the universal feelings of loneliness and dread and the observable violence of a world on-edge, and i certainly thought he did a good job with the broad-spectrum humanity of it, but i'm left feeling about this book the way the narrator describes his own:

It would be no masterpiece, but it certainly would be a book.

however, big points for the inclusions of icehouse, specifically their song Great Southern Land, which can be listened to on the youtube here.

come to my blog!

[Enrique · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un 4,5. Me extraña la puntuación media baja que tiene en GR.

Es una propuesta absolutamente fascinante en la que hay que sumergirse sin mostrar dudas. Olvidé decir que hay que observarla desde un punto de vista abstracto y un tanto surrealista: un pequeño pueblo con una docena de gasolineras, calles circundantes sin final, centros comerciales y grandes cadenas de hamburgueserias en un pueblo semi-despoblado, un autobús urbano en que nadie monta, una emisora local que nadie escucha...Ese es el mundo mágico que nos pinta S. Prescott.

Tras esa puesta en escena ¿que mensaje nos lanza el autor? Dar esa respuesta es lo complejo, ya que de inicio no descubres lo que se propone con esos pueblos que desaparecen etc. Creo que la novela habla de la falta de identidad en el mundo actual, de despersonalización de los pueblos, ciudades y naciones con todas esos negocios globalizadores y multinacionales que unifican a grupos sin dejar matices propios, el despoblamiento de los centros urbanos en favor del turismo y la vida insulsa en torno a los centros comerciales. Los personajes de la novela también tratan de encontrar su identidad individual.

También se habla de la decadencia de la sociedad y el olvido de las raíces. Da igual que el pueblo se desmorone (no hago mucho spoiler, en la portada del libro se ve un gran agujero sobre el pueblo), cada cual sigue con sus rutinas, mirando su propio ombligo.

"Los otros pueblos, la ciudad, o incluso las llanuras somnolientas que había más allá de la brecha, tal vez sólo servían para demostrar que Ciara, yo y todos los demás habitantes del pueblo no éramos reales. Estábamos allí, pero ninguno de nosotros era real".

Solo añadir que esta escritura tan creativa como buena solo la tenía localizada en escritores españoles (tres en concreto), no lo había visto fuera de mi esfera. Me ha sorprendido para bien.

[Michael Livingston · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moody and strange book about boredom, belonging and pointlessness in regional Australia. It combines the foreboding and random violence of Wake in Fright with the allegorical approach and interest in myth-making and storytelling of The Plains and captures something real about Australia.

[Cade Turner-Mann · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Town is a hard book to review. Full disclosure, I live in the Central West of NSW in a place that was a town, then a village, then a rural outpost; so this is close to home. Shaun Prescott's writing blew me away. His prose is eloquent and sparing. The novel itself is intriguing and drags the reader along. The lack of proper resolutions is a stylistic choice but doesn't leave me feeling unsatisfied. My only gripe, and it is a minor one, is the conclusion seemed a bit too drawn out and only offered more questions. However I feel this book will sit highly on my favourites for the year and I'm excited to read more from Shaun Prescott. The Lifted Brow publishing house is defining itself with the release of this book and also Briohny Doyle's, The Island Will Sink, as a major player in contemporary Australian fiction.

5/5

[Trin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sort of like Welcome to Night Vale, if Welcome to Night Vale were more understated and symbolic (read: pretentious), Australian, and boring.

[Calzean · Rating 3 out of 5]

A story about towns disappearing in the Central West of New South Wales told by a wannabe writer who works as a supermarket stacker. He lives is an unnamed but sizeable town full of quirky people, with no history, nothing interesting, a freight train that passes every day but no one knows where to, a bus route with no passengers, a pub with no customers, a radio station with no listeners. The town's old people are ignored and the rest seem to lose themselves in drugs and alcohol. The narrator fails in his attempt to define the reason for the town's existence and sees the gradual but expected disappearance of the town.
The first half of the book was brilliant in its depiction of a failing country town. But slowly I felt just as the town was disappearing the originality of the story telling also was lost.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shaun Prescott's first novel is a strangely compelling Oz-lit amalgam of kitchen-sink drama filtered through an odd, pastoral folk weirdness lens. It's an examination of failure: of motivation, of society, of relationships and of the laws of physics. It's a meditation on the pull exerted by cities and their rural sisters, a contemplation of one's ability to record loss (and the writing process), and something of a rueful love-letter to a particular part of Australia.

The book's unidentified narrator has moved to the unnamed locale to write about disappearing towns. He works at a supermarket, flats with a dickhead and charts a pretty banal course through life. As an outsider, we're presented with a list of things he thinks he'll do, bonds he'll forge - except it doesn't quite work out like that.

You see, The Town has something kind of wrong with it. It has a bus that goes nowhere. A pub nobody drinks at. A radio station listened to by nobody. It's a literal example of the ennui, the sense of solitude the transplant experiences in their new home.

The book is driven by a kind of hypervigilance: an awareness of being the other, of the potential of being bashed for unknown transgressions. There's a constant awareness that - now that he's in this new environment - that its definition seems to fade: there's always someone keen to look outward, to the City or the Country, but never inwards. The Town begins to disintegrate, literally - so should the narrator stay or should he go?

I grew up - at least until my early adolescence - in the Central West of NSW. I spent my formative years in Orange (curiously an apple-growing hot-spot, in contrast to its name) and so I had thought for a long while that Orange was the setting of the book, but it's mentioned by name at one point. Even though it turns out my old town was not The Town, I still felt a kinship to the text; a grudging respect for the verisimilitude of the portrait Prescott's made here.

In her SMH review, Kerryn Goldsworthy suggested Prescott's writing is aligned with Gerald Murnane. I think this is pretty apt: both The Town and Murnane's The Plains share a sense of oddity, unremarked by the inhabitants of their respective zones. I certainly have no problem shelving them together; their focus on consensually-accepted weirdness is a distinct bond.

It's funny, though: other than Murnane, the things I'd compare this book to are films: the languid hell of Wake in Fright, say, or the camp oddity of The Wicker Man but without the caper-cutting or nude fireleaping. Both those films share a certain horror of the environment and are unafraid to have long, expectant shots. There's stuff happening, but it's just out of sight, especially if you're an outsider. This civic hermeticism fuels the interactions of the wider public, but they're unaware of it: The Town's denizens erupt in orgies of violence and nobody bats an eye because... well, it's The Town.

(An aside: I went to the launch of this book - I don't know the author - at a Sydney bookshop. When I arrived, it seemed everyone else knew each other, so like The Town's narrator, I hovered around the periphery for a bit, regarding photographic tomes I'd never buy. I didn't know then, but that was perhaps perfect, given the general feel of the book: I should probably feel relieved there was no Steve Sanderses in attendance.)

I don't think the story is quite as well considered as the feeling of the book: I could take or leave the narration itself, as it's hard to gather much enthusiasm or sympathy for many of the characters, except perhaps the damaged, tape-obsessed Ciara. But I was impressed enough by the rendering of the setting, and of the small observations captured there, to persevere.

That said, I really enjoyed The Town. I think it's a little like the first season of True Detective: the ending can't really deliver on the quietly horrific atmosphere that's been developed, but the atmosphere alone is enough to carry the reader through.

[Kasa Cotugno · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading The Town, a debut novel of existential dread, was a dreamlike experience. An unnamed writer somehow moves to an unnamed town in order to chronicle the disappearing towns of New South Wales. Inhabited by eccentrics who don't seem to have any relationship to one another, this town provides a paradox in that there appear to be many vital businesses, but no customers, no patrons of the many restaurants and fast food outlets. Two shopping malls. The writer claims he's writing about disappearing towns, but not "this" one. While not terribly long, I found it somewhat of a slog and felt it could have been much effective had it been shorter.

[Bandit · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book seems to be described heavily via comparisons with other more famous works. It’s understandable, because here it wouldn’t just be a marketing ploy, this is a genuinely difficult book to describe on its own. If I had to make comparisons, there are aspects of it that are reminiscent of Cook’s work, not so much Fear is the Rider, more like Wake in Fright. Same creepy claustrophobia of it all. But the main reason is that this is a story that’s more mood driven than plot driven. There is, of course, a plot, and it has to do with a man who moves to small town in Central Australia, specifically Central West of New South Wales, to, ostensibly, write a book about the disappearing small towns of the area. But the book stalls and his days are spent working in a supermarket and encountering and interacting with the variously eccentric locals. Eventually the town he’s in begins disappearing as well and he thinks it might be time to move to a city. I know, it isn’t much to go on, but like I said, this isn’t a very plot driven work. The mood though is consistent and hypnotic in a way, there’s a pervasive atmosphere of hopelessness, isolation and alienation. There’s a nearly unmanageable divide between the city and the towns, society structed in such a way that makes integration somewhere between very difficult and impossible. In a way, it works as a commentary on the social shift that occurred in the last century, wherein the population found themselves flocking to the large cities and small towns became no longer viable. In a way, it works as a commentary on the ever so uneven distribution of wealth and resources. But mainly it’s such an emotionally vivid description of being stuck, of not mattering, of not belonging to the world around you and being aware that the world has no use for you, different ways of being homeless and so many ways of being alone. Netgalley classified it under a variety of genres, but none of them are quite accurate, this novel defies such categorization. Yes, the town might be disappearing by something like supernatural means, but this isn’t a work of supernatural. Yes, there are mysterious goings on, but it isn’t a mystery. It’s more like a profoundly existential strange dark trip of a novel. It’s relentlessly gloomy and profoundly unsettling. It reads like (and has all the magnetic crippling hold) of a strange nightmare. One that upon waking you can remember and analyze and recognize the geopolitical themes and social connotations. Which is all to say that it’s a difficult book to recommend and very much an acquired taste. I enjoyed it, it suited my mood at the time and the cloudy rainy day outside provided a perfect backdrop for it. Not for everyone, but those who’ll like it, will probably like it quite a lot. At the very least it’s different and original and well written. Quite an auspicious debut. And technically, should count as an international read, although the metaphysical places this novel speaks of are not really bound by geography. The rest is a matter of personal preferences. Strange, haunting, bleak. Read at your discretion. Thanks Netgalley.

[Cass Moriarty · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘It was only possible to see the full extent of the town if you spent many years there. Only then could you see the barriers shimmer at its edges, and know what the edges meant.’ So begins Shaun Prescott’s quirky and unusual novel The Town (Brow Books 2017). The hapless narrator arrives in the town ostensibly to write a book about the disappearing towns in the Central West region of New South Wales, and finds himself immersed in a strange and unsettling place where nothing is as it seems. He moves into a share house with Rob, he gets himself a job stacking shelves at the local Woolworths, he eats pastries at Michel’s Patisserie and buys books at Angus and Robertson. The town is reminiscent of small towns everywhere in rural Australia – the numerous service stations and pubs, the Friday night fights, the dilapidated buildings and deserted houses. Nothing much happens and nobody is interested in what does happen. No-one knows the history of the area, and no-one cares. The whole place is suffused with a lackadaisical apathy. The people of the town are odd: grief-stricken and unemployed Rick wanders the supermarket each day without a purpose; Jenny runs a hotel that has literally no customers; Tom drives a bus that never picks up passengers and follows a route with no destination; Ciara broadcasts a radio show to no listeners and collects a mysterious hoard of cassette tapes with spooky music; the librarian is strange. The locals are suspicious of this man and his desire to write about their town. They have no interest in him probing, asking questions, or discovering any facts. When he persists, they become downright hostile. And when mysterious holes begin appearing in the town – when the town itself does in fact appear to be disappearing – nobody is much surprised or concerned.
This is an eccentric book written in a certain style that will immediately appeal to certain readers. It is a sort of stream of consciousness account of the past surrounded by pop culture references and vague innuendos. It is a book that takes the reader on a journey of discovery about place and belonging, about relationships and binding ties, and about absence being a presence of sorts. It is a weird, meandering tale that is strangely hypnotic and compulsive. It’s like a maze – just when you think you are getting somewhere, you reach a dead end and have to retrace your steps. It is a book that tells you nothing, and yet somehow leaves you questioning everything.

[Marcia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Het ik-personage van Het verdwijnen, een jonge schrijver, arriveert in een naamloos stadje om lokale nederzettingen te onderzoeken die langzaam verdwijnen. Hij wil een boek wijden aan het verdwijnen van kleine stadjes in New South Wales (Australië) - of zal zijn boek toch over dit specifieke stadje gaan?

Shaun Prescott beschrijft een stadje in verval: in de pub zijn nooit gasten, op het station kun je geen enkele trein nemen en de lokale bus rijdt zijn route zonder passagiers op te pikken. De bevolking verheerlijkt "dat wat vroeger was" en is wantrouwend tegenover buitenstaanders zoals de schrijvers. Maar dan begint de stad letterlijk te verdwijnen..

Ik vond Het verdwijnen prachtig geschreven en genoot van de sombere, bijna apathische sfeer in het stadje. Personages als Ciara, Jenny en Rick geven het verhaal een komische noot, maar tegelijkertijd ook een pijnlijke benauwdheid. Ze zijn wereldvreemd en kennen enkel het leven binnen het stadje. Het leven in het stadje kabbelt maar voort, zonder echte dromen of doelen. Heel confronterend.

Hoewel ik van de conclusie van het verhaal iets meer had verwacht, heb ik genoten van deze debuutroman. Mijn complete recensie lees je op Boekvinder.be.

[Boudewijn · Rating 2 out of 5]

In Het Verdwijnen maken we kennis met 'het stadje', waarin bussen leeg rond rijden, mensen doelloos in supermarkten ronddolen, een dj die overal muziekcassette's achterlaat en een pub waar nooit iemand komt. Het stadje bestaat in zijn isolement, net als zijn bewoners. De rest van de beschaving ligt ergens achter een verre horizon. Er loopt een snelweg doorheen en er is een station waar een keer per week een goederentrein voorbij raast, zonder te stoppen. De inwoners zijn op zichzelf en achterdochtig naar elke nieuwkomer. De hoofdpersoon, schrijver van een boek over verdwijnende stadjes, maakt kennis met de inwoners en hun bizarre avonturen. Op een dag verschijnen er gaten, waarin het stadje (en sommige van haar bewoners) simpelweg verdwijnen.

Een bizarre, vreemde roman. Er zullen ongetwijfeld enkele metaforen aan ten grondslag liggen, maar die ontgingen mij volkomen. Toch was het leesbaar en gaandeweg liet het mij in verbazing achter. Als dat het doel van het boek was, is het in ieder geval daarin geslaagd.

[Knibbs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow, I'm really glad I took a chance on this book. Although I liked the first half much better than the end, I'd still recommend it. Philosophical, existential, with some fantastic imagery and ideas. Easy to read. Definitely in my wheelhouse of the uncanny in the banal.

[Curious Reeds · Rating 4 out of 5]

Longnecks of beer. Michel's Patisserie. The mesmerising and affecting description of a life performance by The Out of Towners. The idea of art without an audience. And lots of holes 🕳🕳🕳

[Maria · Rating 2 out of 5]

Leer Un lugar en el mapa me ha resultado agotador. Las 97 primeras páginas fueron frustrantes. Sin embargo, a pesar de estar lejos de encontrar esa historia interesante y provocadora que prometía en su contraportada, decidí continuar. ¿Por qué? No, desde luego, porque encontrase especialmente atractivas ni la forma de escribir de su autor Shaun Prescott, ni la historia, ni a sus personajes.

Un lugar en el mapa gira en torno a un lugar anónimo (uno de esos lugares anónimos) y a un escritor sin nombre que que acaba de mudarse allí para escribir un libro sobre las poblaciones que han perdido su razón de ser y desaparecen hasta caer en el olvido. Sus habitantes deambulan por una existencia que parece no llevarles a ningún lado hasta que su rutina se ve alterada por la aparición de unos misterioso agujeros amenaza la supervivencia del pueblo.

Si hubiera leído la sinopsis, probablemente, nunca hubiera cogido este libro en la biblioteca. Pero no la leí hasta finalizar la novela, por lo que no podemos decir que eso haya influido.

La historia comienza a desarrollarse muy lentamente mientras conocemos, a través de los ojos del protagonista, a los distintos personajes del pueblo; ninguno demasiado interesante, por cierto, a excepción de Rick, el hombre que deambula por el supermercado. Personajes, por otra parte, con unas rutinas extravagantes y no mucho futuro, algo en lo que coinciden con nuestro protagonista, muy pesado hablando de su libro en cada página. El "he venido aquí a hablar de mi libro" de Umbral, una chiquillada a su lado.

Así trascurren las páginas hasta que los agujeros empiezan a aparecer y el simbolismo aumenta. Unos agujeros que así lo he entendido yo -que no he entendido nada- son la metáfora de su desaparición, de la pérdida de esperanza de sus habitantes y de la invisibilidad tanto de sus habitantes respecto a otras realidades como del resto del mundo respecto al pueblo mismo. 

Vivo en un pueblo de 1700 habitantes, así que admito que parte de sus reflexiones han resonado en mi. En los pueblos resulta fácil refugiarse en la comodidad de lo sencillo, de lo familiar, de lo heredado, del dónde voy ir si aquí lo tengo todo, aunque no se tenga nada. Un conformismo, en ocasiones, mal entendido y frecuentemente asociado con la cobardía en el que se queda y la rebeldía en el que se va. Una rebeldía reflejada en esta historia por Ciara, la joven que huye del pueblo con nuestro protagonista a la ciudad, donde ocurre lo que uno imagina que ocurrirá.

Si os gustan las novelas cargadas de simbolismo, ¡adelante! En mi caso, el no saber si estoy entendiendo lo que el autor quiere trasmitir me frustra muchísimo. Y si este, encima, no es el único problema, ¡apaga y vámonos!

[Joshua Line · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Steve Sanders wants to bash you.'

[Tundra · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was feeling like I might be the victim of some sort of fraudulent activity. Am I really reading a book about nothing? If the protagonist is trying to write a history of a town (unnamed - central west New South Wales) that no one knows the history of and there are no known written records - does it really have a history?

The dead-pan pathos and humour of this narrative when combined with the increasingly bizarre speculative fiction had me hooked. While nothing happens in this town (apart from excessive drinking and quite a bit of brawling) I really wanted to find out where the labyrinth was going to end. A bus driver who drives an endless looping of town without passengers, a radio station with no listeners and a pub with no customers (but yes everyone drinks) and don’t get me started on all those cassette tapes. I guess I know where blank cassettes ended up when people stopped buying them.

This is definitely a slightly bonkers read but it also does make some powerful points about how generic our country towns have become with the growth of large chain stores and how many have (and continue) to disappear into obscurity. They only really exist for the people that live in them and those people can fear what they don’t know. I also think there was quite a bit to be said about how we worry about all the small issues and around us the world is facing much bigger issues that will effect the entire planet. It might actually be that we are all actually disappearing into a big hole of nothing.

The final 1/3 of the book was not quite as gripping. The humour was no longer there and the grim reality of the underbelly of most of our big cities was probably a lot more familiar.

Bran Presser has raved about how underrated (or perhaps under the radar ) this book has been and I definitely agree it is pretty special. The writing style reminds me a bit of The Cage by Lloyd Jones.

[Bat · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this one up because I read that it's about the appearance of normalcy on the surface while everything is actually quite cosmic, which is exactly what I'm interested in. I was hoping that it would be an existential, cosmic horror, and to an extent it is, but it's also about belonging, normalcy and boredom. The problem with books about boredom, though, is that they tend to get quite boring as they go on.

This book takes a very literal interpretation on "disappearing towns" and portrays the life of a nameless protagonist trying to understand these disappearances, and trying to capture the essence of small towns by writing a book.
The story is a bit long for the subject, and while there is a sense of "weirdness" throughout, it is often not bizarre enough. The writing style is very distant, which made the story difficult to get into. It was too verbose and barely ever included tangible elements, which made it so dull. I didn't feel very engaged by it, nor by the characters, whose personalities I really couldn't tell you anything about even after finishing the whole book.

I'm glad I gave it a try, but the plot, writing and characters were all too lukewarm and distant to live up to the premise.

[Bram · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really knew nothing about The Town other than a bunch of people whose opinions I respected said I had to read it. And holy crap, they were right! Darkly humorous and deeply unsettling, it is a masterpiece of small town ennui reminiscent of JG Ballard, Iain Banks and, dare I say it, Franz Kafka. There are so many perfectly executed set pieces, but it is the way they are weaved together around the framework of a wannabe author researching a book on disappearing and disappeared towns only to find himself unwittingly stumbling upon one that really makes this book a continuous source of creepy delights. Seriously, just go and read it.

[Richard Howard · Rating 2 out of 5]

We'll, there's several hours of my life I won't get back. The Town starts out quite promisingly with a 'Kafka in the Outback' feel but it soon disappears up its own and becomes a pretentious, meandering mess in which nothing of any significance happens and, worse, it becomes dull, dull, dull. Somewhere in there is a message about the artificiality of Australia and its failure to accommodate and appreciate its true heritage but it's lost in a meandering, portentous narrative.
Do yourself a favour: skip this one.

[Blair · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really terrific first novel that seems to me to have been strikingly influenced by Gerald Murnane's great Australian novel The Plains, but without being derivative of it. Prescott has his own story to tell, which unfolds in a somewhat magical realist abstract way. He captures modern Australia beautifully.

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

A boy traces the patch where his void and ours overlap. Hilarity ensues.

[Maura Heaphy Dutton · Rating 1 out of 5]

Yikes. Might have been interesting as a short story, for about about 20 pages, but the prospect of 200 more like that ... let's just say, I bailed ...

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I first heard about this book back in September when I saw a review of it in The Weekend Australian, and it intrigued me because The Australian doesn’t often review books from micro publishers like Brow Books.  Ed Wright’s review of The Town ran to two whole columns, and it began like this:
Riffing off authors such as Gerald Murnane, Shaun Prescott builds an idiosyncratic vision that is simultaneously banal and powerfully moving. The Weekend Australian, September 6-17
So I bought a copy.  Gerald Murnane is, after all, unique, so I was interested to see if Ed Wright knew what he was talking about.  Since then, however, The Town has been reviewed all over the place, the SMH, the Sydney Review, and the ABR and probably elsewhere as well.  That’s quite a splash for a debut novel…
But much as I love the enigmatic writing of Gerald Murnane, I suspect that for some readers, the comparison is like the kiss of death.  So I am here to reassure you that The Town is not as weird and strange or abstract as The Plains to which it is being compared and I don’t think it’s like the fictions that Murnane himself describes as conceptual literature.
For a start, The Town has characters.  Murnane, in A Million Windows repudiates the idea of characters, and indeed he is somewhat patronising about undiscerning readers who expect more in the way of narrative conventions.  But The Town has some quite engaging characters – all of them with names except for the narrator.  And in The Town, the bricks-and-mortar realism of recognisable settings littered with Woolworths and BP, Golden Arches and Michel’s Patisserie, is nothing like the dreamy landscapes of The Plains where the concept of a plot is equally foreign.  Whereas I can tell you what happens in The Town, no problem.
The narrator is a wannabe author who wants to write the history of disappearing towns in the central west of New South Wales.  He makes his way to an unnamed town marooned somewhere between the city (later revealed as Sydney) and the vast emptiness of the inland.  He gets casual work stacking shelves in the local Woolworths, and he shares a house with Rob while he sets out looking for material for his book.
What he finds is lethargy, stagnation and inertia.  Nobody knows anything about the history of the town because nothing of any significance has ever happened there.  Whereas he had assumed that there must be some kind of intellectual or artistic sub-culture, everyone he meets seems banal.  The disconcerting elements of this novel arise when the reader meets the fatalistic characters who signpost the futureless destiny of the town...
To read the rest of my review (and to access links to my thoughts about the fictions of Gerald Murnane to whom this author is compared) please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/12/17/t...

[Gerii Pleitez · Rating 4 out of 5]

One arvo I had a couple glasses of vermouth at the bar next to Paperback bookshop in Melbourne. I love getting a little loaded and buying great local writers there. I got to talking about The Town by Shaun Prescott with the store attendant. We agreed that this book feels like an honest, hard boiled story about life as an outsider in the microcosm of country town life. Prescott creates mood and character in his prose through landscape. The local shopping mall, the pub, even the local train station. He gives locations a pulse and I think it's important, because somehow these places feel familiar to most of us. When Prescott writes about these town landmarks he writes about it with a level of affection and these places become people you either grew up with or you knew of.

You can’t get too comfortable though because Prescott uses his prose to defamilairise you almost immediately. A ballsy and intensely interesting move as an author, one which requires skill. He pulls it off especially with the way he uses music. Whether it's through Chiara's keyboard music or a pub band which magically appears and then disappears, leaving a pub full of people crying. He uses sound to make the town feel other-worldly or like it was all a fucking dream you witnessed. He reinforces this with his extended ‘hole’ metaphor. Yep weird holes appear in the town which end up consuming not just the landscape but the story too in many ways.

Prescott charges the whole thing with this sense that wanton destruction can happen at any moment. He builds the tension consistently in the book, through the way characters interact with one another. He gives us a great swatch of your usual town suspects. When violence happens it makes an impression. The destruction the characters impart on their hometown is aggressive, yet reveals their apathy, the indifference only owners can display. It's a distinctly masculine tension and I think this serves well to add some critique, or at least contributes to the conversation, about our own toxic masculinity. Shout out to Shaun for giving us an Australian story which is modern, almost pastoral and lingers with intelligence.

[Meanderer · Rating 1 out of 5]

The book concerns an aspiring author who describes himself as an uninteresting person who talks to people he generally regards to be similarly uninteresting. He records and collects these conversations as material for a book he is writing about dying towns. Sadly the book is not more than the sum of its parts.

The author in the story seems self-absorbed and even when he is talking to others, seems uninterested in anything they have to say, appearing wholly engrossed in his own ideas and observations. Spending time with such an unlikable person (fictional or not) becomes wearisome after a while.

The only redeeming element in the story is the sympathy the author feels for the people and communities of these places. It often seemed to me, however, that even this was a device by which he signaled his virtue. Like the towns which are the subject of the story, the book is not a place worth visiting and best entirely avoided.

[Julia Tulloh Harper · Rating 3 out of 5]

I actually really admire this book, and found reading it totally fascinating. The story follows an unnamed narrator who moves to a NSW rural town to write about 'disappearing' towns (disappearing both figuratively and literally). It's about bordeom and ennui, capitalism, small town Australia (and big city Australia), myths of belonging, the function of 'history', the function of art, and a whole host of other stuff. Really interesting and really great prose style. I only didn't give it more stars because ultimately I found it hard to invest in - it kind of read at times like a fictionalised version of an essay, though I guess that was part of the point. I recommend it, though it probably isn't to everyone's tastes. But I look forward to more from Shaun Prescott, and bravo Brow Books for once more publishing something so unlike everything else out there.

[Joshua Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Been in a bit of a reading slump lately, but this novel has restored my faith in reading

[Susan The Book Dragon Campton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Welcome my fellow Book Dragons, to Freakish Friday. The coyotes are howling on this last night of February, the wind is still whipping a bit out there. Come closer to the fire, I’ve something to show you. I have to keep it in this glass case you see, can’t take it out. If it hits the air, the odd thing will disappear. What’s that? Oh, yes, you heard me right, I said disappear. See, it looks like a bit of sandstone, brown, wavy lines, but it’s not, it was found in the wilderness, in Australia, somewhere in New South Wales and sent to me anonymously with instructions about keeping it in this case. See how it seems to shimmer about the edges? I told you it was odd. This was created by a bloke named Shaun Prescott, it’s his “The Town”.
It’s the tale of a writer who goes to a town in the Central West region of New South Wales. He’s working on a book about town’s that disappear, not turn into ghost towns. No..these towns actually disappear. They are no more. Not a building, a roadway, a sign, a person is left. Nothing to say it was there.
He is not writing about the town he is – at first. He just needs a place to get a job for some getting on money and a place to work quietly on his book. He meets a cast of odd characters. There’s Jenny who oversees a pub with never any patrons. There is Tom who lives on and drives the town bus that no one ever rides. There are more, but to tell would be to spoil it for you and I don’t want to do that.
I would have given this tale a four, but for one thing. It was too long. This would have made a fascinating novella, an excellent short story, but an entire book was just too much. This is Prescott’s debut novel and it was a grand story, it reminded me of an old Twilight Zone episode or an Outer Limits, the originals, not the things they keep dredging up like a dead horse and trying to feed the latest generation of teens. The tale was indeed creepy, foreboding and from what I understand about small towns in the area, much like many rural, tiny towns in places in the U.S. there is more than a ring of truth here, but and it’s definitely a but, the story could have been a bit tighter, the ending a bit creepier and all with less.
If you are in the mood for a bit of a creep, and don’t mind it being a bit lengthy, crack on and give “The Town” a bit of a whirl. Throwback Thursday will be posted tomorrow, I do apologize but the internet just was not cooperating last night.
Until tomorrow, I remain, your humble Book Dragon, Drakon T. Longwitten
I won this in a Goodreads giveaway, thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux publishing.