Connor Coyne

I am very excited to announce the first installment of one of the most dynamic aspects of this project. Gothic Funk Press has finished producing the first of several promotional videos for this novel. It features text from Hungry Rats, includes a new song by Richard Whaling, stars Emily Perkins-Harbin as Meredith Malady, and was shot by Forge 22 and myself.

This video is to act exactly like a movie preview: by giving viewers a compelling glimpse of the story it encourages them to take a closer look, and hopefully to order the book. The video is an example of “viral marketing.” Viral marketing is a strategy that uses new technology in combination with the oldest form of advertising: word-of-mouth. If enough people are excited about Hungry Rats, and spread the word, the project builds buzz. This can more than compensate for our limited budget, but I can’t do it without your involvement. I repeat: I can’t do it without your involvement!

Please do all or any of the following to help share Hungry Rats far and wide.

1. Watch the video, and give it a five star rating! Leave comments. You can watch the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoEaYl45z7E

2. Use the buttons at the bottom of the YouTube screen to share the video by email, Facebook, Twitter, or other networks.

3. You can also embed the video on your blog or website by posting the “embed” code from the YouTube page.

4. Many people forward emails to friends and family, so share the Hungry Rats videos with these people!

5. Overall, these videos are of central importance to marketing the novel… They are our best chance we have to increase excitement in the novel, and so a few enthusiastic emails and postings can make just as much of a difference as a donation. If you like the video, please consider sharing it with everyone you know, and encourage recipients to pass it down the chain.

Thank you for all of your help!

Connor Coyne

In recent updates, I’ve talked about Hungry Rats through the lens of the lumber era, teen noir, and fairy tales. That leaves just two important contexts: serial killers and Flint, Michigan.

Today I’ll tackle Flint.

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From Hungry Rats:

By the time the lumberjacks arrived, Flint, Michigan was already decades old. It grew from a trading post near some old Indian battlegrounds. The warriors left their ghosts when they died. The fur traders came and left their ghosts, and so did the lumberjacks. Carriage makers and auto barons. Then, a great wave came from Germany, Ireland, England, Hungary, New York, Missouri, Tennessee and Kentucky. They built cars through the second World War, tore down buildings and threw up huge chunks of concrete. Sheet metal and train tracks stretched from one end of town to the other and the factories went out in every direction. Then, half of the people left. They left their ghosts behind too.

You can’t really throw a famous book without hitting the author who wrote it from “exile”: James Joyce, Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov… they all wrote about places “they were but weren’t any more.” Ernest Hemingway was perhaps the most prolific diasporic writer, living seemingly everywhere, moving along, and then later writing about it.

In my case, I haven’t lived in Flint in years, and being one of the more picked-upon communities in this country, it’s awkward writing about the city from a genre that, by definition, digs up the dregs of our social existence. In fact, Hungry Rats surprised me by being the most publication-friendly of all my writings.

That said, I don’t think anyone would question my commitment to Flint. I lived in the pleasant, stable East Village neighborhood for most of my childhood, and later rented out a couple apartments on the rough and messy Eastside. I went to high school in the nearby suburb of Flushing, which might be described as an improved Eisenhower-era enclave, and have since divided most of my adult life between Chicago and New York.

Why write about Flint and what does it have to do with Hungry Rats?

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Part of the argument merits objectivity.

Flint boasts a plot arc worthy of Hamlet or King Lear: it tells a powerful, compelling, and (yes) tragic story. The city was once a small town based around a profitable trading post. Through the lumber era and the establishment of the auto industry, Flint rose to become one of the most dynamic and wealthy of America’s industrial cities, and a palpable symbol of American power as Sherman Tanks rolled off the GM lines in Grand Blanc a few miles to the south. The presence of a strident union couched prosperity in pragmatic, real-world terms, and local institutions seemed to deliver on their promises. The height of Flint’s prestige was the height of American prestige, period.

But proseperity was fleeting. In a few decades, Flint suffered from ugliness both social (white flight) and economic (deindustrialization). Today, just 150 years into the story, much of the city is scarred and blighted, and much of it has burned down. Most tellingly, much of the city has been abandoned, and side streets can be very quiet at times. Whenever I bring a visitor there, they are struck by the severity of these images. And yet, once that first impression has settled a little, they are surprised by the richness of life there, the responding sharpness and energy and innovation: in street fairs, underground concerts, back porch art, late night cruises. Really: the city is half-empty and bankrupt, but also packed to the neck with astonishing art, music, theater, and the most poetic roads you’ve ever driven.

Quite simply, Flint, Michigan is one hell of a story, and I’m one of a small number of humans qualified to tell it.

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Part of the argument demands subjectivity.
Hungry Rats is my strongest novel to date, and Hungry Rats couldn’t have happened without Flint.

In 2003, I was a starving artist, emphasis on the word “starving,” and I decided to move back to Flint for the summer to get some more writing done. The plan was to work part-time and to live off a bit of money I’d saved up while temping in Chicago. The cost of living is a lot less in Flint, so I got a job as a dishwasher (night-shift on weekends) at the famous Angelo’s Coney Island, and I took out a lease on Maryland Ave. near Iowa. The Eastside is a rapidly changing neighborhood with a few landlords leasing apartments to dozens, or hundreds, of families. Things change year-by-year and block-by-block, and this particular block was just then taking a turn for the worse.

At the same time, I heard about a writing project called National Novel Writing Month, in which one creates a 50,000-word novel draft between November 1st and November 30th. I started planning, and quickly decided that I wanted to write a noirish mystery. I thought it would be fun to write in second person, and I dimly imagined activating some menace from an long, unburied past nosing its way into the present. But what do do and where to begin?

One night — it might have been July, or it might have been August — my girlfriend and I went out for a pleasant drive. We left the city long after dark and grabbed a late meal at a coney island up near the reservoir. We drove back into Flint, the long way around, checking out the old mansions and willow-heavy parks on the southwest side; Woodcroft where the most famous engineers and executives from the world’s largest corporation used to live. Then, I drove back home around Kearsley Park, a beautiful old space modeled on Olmstead and Vaux’s New York spaces. This put me on a notorious thoroughfare with a lot of abandoned shacks and vacant lots, so I wasn’t too surprised when I saw a sack of garbarge lying in the middle of the road. “Oh, that’s nice,” I thought, when I realized that the sack was open, spilling trash into the street. And then I suddenly saw that the trash wasn’t trash, but a human being.

We sped home and called 911 at once.

The newspaper typically reports homicides with clocklike reliability, and nothing was posted in subsequent days, so I assume that the person we saw wasn’t dead; perhaps she had gotten drunk and passed out. I probably won’t ever know for sure. Certainly, I wish and hope that nothing serious happened there.

Later, I recalled another story a friend had told me; probably made up, probably to frighten me. We were camping on Lake Michigan (in those days, you really could camp out on the Warren Dunes parking lot for five dollars), and on one particularly foggy night he told me that he had seen three people in black robes, wading into the lake, lifting their arms to the sky for God knows what reason.

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I’ve really been blessed in life; I’m luckier than most people I know, so much so that I often don’t know what to do about it. It is both bizarre and a little unsettling that this novel, soon to be published, is so firmly rooted in my own experiences, which are themselves, isolated and non-representational.

That said, I can own this:

If you read Chapter One here, I lived in Meredith’s house. I’ve seen things that she has seen and I’ve heard things that she has heard, and they all combined in 2003, and in five minutes there I knew the plot of the novel I’ve been developing for the last seven years. Funny, huh?

But no, there is no Hungry Rats without Flint.

There is absolutely no story whatsoever.

From Hungry Rats:

It all comes down to money, that money coursing in from Flint and Saginaw and Detroit.  “Bring us lumber!” they bellowed.  “Bring us lumber, and don’t trouble to worry for the welfare of those shanty boys, whether they work an honest day or lop the ends off the logs.  The only thing is wood, wood, and bring it fast.”  The trains ran in and out and the forests vanished.  The people became enraged with us because they were a poor folk in a country of stumps, while we still took in our hundreds of dollars.  Yet we paid out hundreds of dollars.

One of the most exciting parts of the Hungry Rats project was researching and writing about Michigan’s lumber era, a crucial facet of the Westward expansion that generated more capital than any American gold rush, and without which the auto industry would certainly have bypassed Detroit.

19th century Michigan had much more in common with the Old West than with its Great Lakes neighbors, and like the West, the “romantic” trappings of this time (from gunslingers and saloons to Indian camps and brothels) really existed in an environment of lawlessness, aggressive commerce, and the exploitation of immigrants and native peoples.

Lumber-era Michigan was, quite simply, a frontier that expanded faster than the growth of more “civilized” institutions. Set apart from its neighbors by the lakes, the waterways also provided a means for transporting huge stocks of lumber needed for a country exploding in population. In this it also abetted the rise of Chicago and the rapidity of Western settlement. Michigan was clear-cut from the 1860s to the 1890s, and grew from a cold and neglected outpost to the center of industrial enterprise in the U.S.

The middle third of Hungry Rats concerns itself with two historical serial killers based out of Clare County. They acted with near impunity and one of them earned the moniker “the devil of Hell.” But there are many real characters from the weird half-century that saw the logging-off of North America’s most extensive forestland. P.K. Small, the Ogre of Seney, was known for eating anything and everything in sight, Warren Bordwell’s Saginaw brothel masqueraded as an opera house, and Dan Seavey was a Lake Michigan pirate who escaped from jail in Chicago and commandeered a ship. The infamous Catacombs of Bay City would have given New York’s Five Points district a run for its money.

If Hungry Rats enjoys any success at all, I hope that it encourages a closer look at this compelling and vital phase of American history. Michiganders, especially, should know this stuff; it is significant, and just as importantly, it makes for great reading. I’ve provided a few links below, but (in keeping with the slight obscurity of this era) most research hasn’t made the leap to the internet. I’m happy to provide a Bibliography upon request. Some great books on the subject (almost entirely out-of-print) can be gotten cheaply through Amazon.

Dan Seavey, the Lake Michigan Pirate: http://www.classicwisconsin.com/features/ourpirate.htm
Nellie Bly, a journalist, went to Seney, Michigan’s own Deadwood. Lots of good stuff here: http://wildwoodpress.org/a-shadowy-saga-of-seney/
Some sites on the lumber era in general:
http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1976/3/1976_3_4.shtml
http://seekingmichigan.org/look/2010/01/12/logging-camp
http://www.michiganepic.org/lumbering/lumbering.html
http://www.classroomhelp.com/lessons/michigan/lumber7.html

Now Flint is the second city in Michigan to have its very own Wikipedia photo mosaic: check it out.

Almost to the end.

I’m allowing myself a closing argument.

Flint has been in decline since before I was born, and very soon almost the entirety of its residents will only remember the city’s downfall. In the last fifty years, the population has halved, and Flint has gone from an expansionist vision of a future that saw it eclipsing competing cities to the possibility of demolishing whole neighborhoods that have emptied out.

During this time there have been a lot of attempts to resurrect the city in its old glory, and many of them were, frankly, unrealistic. At times the main drag, which is the oldest road in the region and a conduit through four major cities (including Detroit) has been cordoned off for an ill-conceived pedestrian mall. Parking meters and haphazard one-way streets were installed downtown at the same time as free parking was added to the strip malls and plazas of the suburbs. AutoWorld, a hare-brained theme park expected to draw a million visitors annually was probably Flint’s greatest embarrassment. However, an era of inept political leadership (two mayors have been deservedly forced out of office in the last ten years alone) has probably been more damaging.

These issues are all surrounded and dominated by the withdrawal of General Motors. In 1978, almost 80,000 people worked for GM locally. That number has shrunk by 90%, and the process continues today. Flint at its peak had 200,000 residents, and the county under 500,000. Even under expert leadership, well-coordinated institutional support, and an aggressively inventive private sector, Flint would have been doomed to a steep decline. In reality, the severity and speed of its actual decline is part of the reason this city is so analyzed, even on an international level.

The last several years have realized, finally, a more pragmatic and well-considered response. A decade of selective investment in the downtown area has prepared the way for a time when several expanding commuter colleges would go residential. In the last decade Kettering University on the West Side built dormitories, and has been followed this year by housing downtown at the University of Michigan campus. The area between the two schools has been approved for redevelopment and park space (several proposals involve brownfield left by GM along the Flint river, which could reflect the Olmstead-style Kearsley Park across town). The idea is that a sizeable mixed-income population will encourage investment and rising property values.

The East Side is instrumental to these plans. While it does not have a residential campus, it is the site of the Cultural Center, which has been an anchor and an asset to Flint for over fifty years. Mott College, which is itself expanding, and the stable neighborhood of the East Village bound this area on the south and east. If anything, this part of the city has helped shore up the downtown area far more than downtown has driven regional commerce. If Flint’s current slow-growth development works as intended, in one decade we will see a viable urban corridor running from the western city limits to Dort Highway. Of course, this corridor will still be bounded by the poverty and devaluation of surrounding neighborhoods, and the disparity will be extreme. However, given the severity of disinvestment, it is hard to imagine any permanent progress being made in Flint without some consolidation and growth.

The Flint School District, too, is a critical piece of the puzzle, albeit in a less obvious way, and from a less promising position. The district has cycled through three superintendents in the last several years, and has fallen victim to hare-brained schemes of its own. Earlier this decade the graduation rate was pegged at around 40%. And yet, if you haven’t noticed, most of the current redevelopment plans involve higher education in some form or another. Three colleges are in the targeted development areas, and a fourth just outside of city limits. If Flint’s progress is contingent on collegiate educational growth, yet city residents are not equipped to participate in that growth, then there is every reason to think that whatever progress does occur will be segmented, or worse, superficial. Therefore: By any means necessary public schools in Flint have to fix their problems. At this point, it is as important a question as GM’s continuing presence.

Flint Central and its campus are an asset that cannot be replaced. We needn’t rely on sentimental reasons for saving the school. Any short-term gains achieved by demolishing the building (even if another structure is built on-site) would be offset by the inability of future development to fill such a unique and necessary niche in the city’s social and geographic landscape (an architect friend of mine has observed that $27 million today could not construct a school in any style of Central’s size). Central is emblematic of Frank Manley’s community education experiments, which are more relevant to Flint today than ever before, and the campus has ideal access to the city’s most successful institutions. True, the problem of retaining the physical structure could be ameliorated by selling the building to Powers Catholic, but the most long-term solution, the solution that enables Flint’s population to be the necessary and participatory force in the city’s recovery demands that the school remain with in the public school system. Get the money from our foundations and federal stimulus money, beg, borrow, and steal from alumni, find and coerce the genius behind the Kalamazoo Promise, go on Oprah and beg, do whatever it takes. Fix Central, upgrade Northern, and make these two high schools the effective poles of newer, meaner, sharper magnet programming and community education. $27 million isn’t pocket change, but it isn’t that much either when calculated against the capital of a reenergized city center.

Central High School could be one the most decisive elements in a retooled and realistic master plan for the City of Flint.

And in my mind, when those polished doors swing open again, its the Indians they will welcome home.

Part 1: Here.
Part 2: Here.
Part 3: Here.
Part 4: Here.