13 FROM THE SWAMP: Passaic River Lore

by Wheeler Antabanez

UFOs over Troy Meadows. An abandoned farmhouse in Livingston. Voodoo rituals in Newark. Wheeler takes us on a Passaic River journey through the urban swamps of North Jersey, revealing a side of the river most people never get to see. Traveling by canoe and speedboat, Wheeler braves epic pollution to uncover hidden mysteries of the highly contaminated Passaic River. This slim title is jam-packed with tales of forsaken industry, brazen graffiti, and yes, even a dead body or two. Fully illustrated with black and white photography, Wheeler is prepared to show you… not just tell you. Want to know what’s under all those bridges you’ve been seeing from your car window? Read 13 FROM THE SWAMP!
Praise for Wheeler
"Wheeler Antabanez is the Passaic River's modern day Huck Finn..."
-NPR

“Wheeler knows this river like maybe nobody else, but he's more of a nihilist than an environmentalist…”
-The Star Ledger

“As a kid, he grew up reading Twain and Robert Lewis Stevenson. As a writer, the Passaic became his passion. Antabanez sees a strange kind of beauty, where others would see watery urban decay.”
-The Bergen Record“

Antabanez writes with a wry and witty voice that dips into tones of compelling intensity.”
-Publisher’s Weekly

108 pages, Paperback

Published November 6, 2019

Reviews

[Seth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just the mere words "New Jersey" and "Passaic River" are plenty enough that a lazy author need not write much more than that to strike a profound horror and near-crippling dread into the imagination of many a reader. Luckily for us, Wheeler is no lazy author. Many of the tales contained in this collection are, presumably, from his own myriad explorations of the liminal spaces along the length and breadth of the befouled and neglected Passaic River (see his brilliant Weird NJ special edition "Nightshade on the Passaic") - as suitable a setting, if not more so, as any for a series of modern-day horror tales. Every one of these 13 tales delivers thrills and chills as well as subtle anthropological observations on the present-day ecological and sociological challenges that reside in the putrescape that is post-industrial New Jersey

[David Garza · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's kind of like journal entries with the intent of poems, but that might not be quite it. Like the waters of the Passaic, it gets murky.

I have to be honest, the writing itself is often very straight-forward and pedestrian, but there was just something about Antanaez's small, adventurous journeys down the river that made me not care (for a change) how simple his writing was. Perhaps it was his love for the river that shone through. I kept reading; I kept wanting to find out what his next portrait of the dirty, polluted New Jersey river was going to be. I hit pay dirt towards the end, when he fashions a jack-o-lantern out of a floating pumpkin discarded in the river. Now I want to do that.