Book Review: Sandusky Burning

Title: Sandusky Burning

Author: Bryan W. Conway

Date: 2020

Publisher: Bryan W. Conway

ISBN: 978-0-5788172-8-6

Quote: "The pay was low, the hours long, and the work was oftne unpleasant."

Though it's marketed as a crime thriller, the Book Funnel edition of Sandusky Burning that I received during the Booktober Blitz is not a crime story at all. It may be building up to one. It's a sample that tricked me because the first two or three chapters of this book are longer than some full-length genre novels from Book Funnel. There is probably a plot, if you read the full-length book as it was printed, and that plot probably involves crime and may pick up speed and intensity as it gets going. 

What I have is, instead, a study of a cheap, run-down trailer park and the people who live and work in it. They're not the nicest set of people. The women workers are cheap foreign labor and are expected to work two jobs, one legitimate, one not. The women may have been coerced into prostitution while the men seem to have got into their second jobs, also illegitimate, on their own. They take drugs or sell them, spy on each other, steal one another's stuff. Some of them are nastier than others. Some of them may be decent fellows, on the whole, but they certainly are not gentlemen. 

Conway is a professional writer. This book is at least standing on the steps of serious Literary Fiction, showing a detailed and sympathetic consideration of the different kinds of people doing entry-level jobs, their plights, and their relationships with one another. I've never worked in a trailer park but, based on my experience working in factories and restaurants, I'm inclined to think some real study of entry-level workers went into this book. I found myself starting to recognize the characters' names without looking them up, even take an interest in what the author's going to let happen to them next.

And then what happens next is a nasty little note saying you don't get the whole book free of charge, as the promotional page may have made you think. I don't think very much of people who use that kind of trick. 

The writing, the vivid portrait of a gritty but obviously loved city in the Rust Belt, should appeal to readers who like male-oriented adventure stories written with skill and empathy. Should we buy books from people who send out chopped-off chapters that pretend to be books? Meh. Maybe it's at your public library.