However, even Phoebe isn’t prepared to accept the radical changes that overtake five local girls, changes that bring shame, suspicion, and eventually chaos to the insular community. Troublemaker and oddball Phoebe hatess this tendency, which always subordinates wives to husbands and daughters to everyone. The plant is in decline, which makes the locals all the more desperate to preserve what little they have left of the status quo. The workers are contemplating yet another strike when the summer of 1980 rolls around, this time to prevent layoffs. At the center of them all is the local steel mill, increasingly obsolete but the central focus of the landscape and everyone in it. Cleveland in the 80s (and again in the modern day) seems like it ought to be mundane, but the looming smokestack and run-down homes make for an eerie and appropriate backdrop. It has many of the elements of the other “punks”-Steampunk and Cyberpunk-like a focus on technology and social upheaval but is very much a product of its time and place. This book defies standard categories of horror, and I can think of no better description for it than Rustpunk. It’s a potent mixture of slow and sudden horror, with a bit of the pure uncanny thrown in for good measure. Gwendolyn Kiste has combined the generalized dread of a community in decay with the very particular horror of bodies-specifically female bodies-undergoing terrible transformation. It’s that same spirit that infuses The Rust Maidens, an intimate portrait of Cleveland as a locus of Rust Belt decline.
Even the smallest, most mundane towns could hide secrets that could upend science and logic. Witches and monsters and aliens and mutants all fit in a country that seemed so familiar but also so exciting. The media and the internet was already making America smaller, but The X-Files made it seem so big. What I loved about The X-Files (while it was still airing not the reboot garbage) was its commitment to showing all the weird little subcultures and sub-subcultures of American life.
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