Henrytown

by Chris Erickson

Overview

Twenty years ago, Henrytown came crackling over Rocky Mountain radio frequencies as a spoken history—a series of tall tales Chris Erickson would recite between folk songs on his insomniac broadcast “The Old-Time Music & Lore.” A chimerical masterwork of storytelling and performance art, Erickson’s folklore recast the American Midwest as its own fantastical condition, captivating a cult-listenership steeped in small-town mythologies like Wisconsin Death Trip, Winesburg, Ohio, and Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Pigeons.

This volume, produced in partnership between Dzanc Books and Graver Goods, brings that beloved town back to the page.

Local brainiac Amber Kusnetsov goes missing after a mediocre performance on a biology quiz. A deadly explosion at Polk Plastics sends plumes of acrid smoke into the community.  Gloria-half-of-something the Wampus Cat murders dirtbike enthusiast Mandu Fam Lam Bartlum behind the Park Tavern. Old Lookie floats slowly over the earth on his adult tricycle. John Dinger the Large is on his way to Niantic to kill trolls!

Sung out by a town crier as mysteriously attuned to weather patterns and local myths as he is to the pandemonium of American speech, Chris Erickson’s debut work isn’t so much a novel as a telling the bees—a promiscuous, hive-minded folklore which speaks in many voices at once, past the human, and knows that every town is its own living breathing superorganism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781938603334
Publisher:	Dzanc Books
Publication date:	08/05/2025
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Chris Erickson is from Decatur, Illinois. His debut novella Henrytown is forthcoming on Graver Goods Press, an imprint of Dzanc Books, in 2025. His writing has appeared in The American Reader, Gigantic, Action Spectacle, Capilano Review, Seneca Review, PANK, benmarcus.com, and The Hobo-Tramp Voice. He has performed in a number of venues, including E. Claire Raley Studios for the Performing Arts, Third Space Art Collective, Literary Death Match - Los Angeles, John Natsoulas Center for the Arts, Sacramento Poetry Center, and Slatter's Court. He is a graduate of the UC Davis Creative Writing Program, and still lives in Davis, CA.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Henrytown is the funniest serious prose (and the most serious funny prose) I have encountered in contemporary American literature.  Erickson is much more of a postmodern-day Stein than people in the industry are like to tell you (let alone themselves).  People in the industry are like to say that he’s more like Stein’s good pal, Sherwood Anderson, on LSD.  It makes a lot of sense for them to think this way, given how many millions of hits of LSD the U.S. government pumped into the college campuses in the years between Anderson’s death and Erickson’s birth (a period when the college campuses still presented a threat to the American commitment to war profiteering).  But anyway screw the people in the industry—it is wrong for them to suggest that the strangeness compelling a great writer is drug-induced.  Such a suggestion implies that the world is not inherently a strange place, but is only made strange… occasionally, when the established, appropriately “normal” view is impinged upon by some exterior factor.  I lump in Erickson with Stein and Anderson because he shares in their sense that the “normal” view is in fact the strangest view of all.  These writers don’t need tragedy (i.e., the interruption of normalcy) to trigger their sense of what is strange about us.  This is not to say that they live in denial of tragedy, or that they are super-naive about the security of the autonomy of the will; no, it is only to say that the strangeness of tragedy’s inevitability is, for these peculiarly American writers, not reckoned to be as telling as the strangeness that precedes it.  What is strangest, in other words, and perhaps most human, is that we do things… and we say things… all the while routinely acting like our doing and our saying are related to one another in some real or lasting way.  Happiness, for this reason, might even be funnier than unhappiness."

-Joe Wenderoth, author of LETTERS TO WENDY'S

Editorial Reviews

"A woman named Lady Button who fashions herself a cape of sex toys; the town mayor, who brushes his teeth so hard he wears off the enamel; his wife, Pilar Kusnetsov, who gives birth to twenty-eight children; 'One Actual Local Geezer Named Misty,' who, in one day, walks across the entire community to traverse the line between good and bad actors–these are but a few of the delightful characters in Henrytown, a nonlinear narrative which leaves one gasping at the power of the short burst woven into the larger tapestry. The cohesion of these dozens of disparate characters is testament to Chris Erickson’s ability to distill the essence of human quirk into one narrative that makes the heart ache and sing, all at the same time. Henrytown ushers in an exciting new voice in experimental literature."

—Jacinda Townsend, author of Trigger Warning

"I don't write blurbs, on gp. If I wrote blurbs, though, I would sure as fuck write one for Henrytown. I even considered violating my policy to do it, but imagine how many previous requesters this would piss off!"

—Joe Wenderoth, author of Letters to Wendy's

 

 

"I’ve long wondered whether writers were out there who might take up the mantle of Derek McCormack’s spare, acidic humor, and relentless movement throughout equivalent bizarre tableaux. I’ve found McCormack’s logical heir in Chris Erickson’s brilliant, relentless Henrytown, a work as shifting and fragmented as the times, and as compelling a new voice as I’ve encountered in years."

 

—Grant Maierhofer, author of Traumnovelle

From the Publisher