Set In A Small Town: There's a Book For Your Type
by Kimberley M. McNamara
Small towns are often featured in works of fiction: novels, plays, movies, and tv shows. The Small-town mystique lends itself to fictional works because they are in essence snow globes where the outside world, the bigger, grittier, more enlightened world doesn’t intrude. The bubble of the small town exists, and its characters play within its confines.
Three major small-town types:
One: The Seedy Underbelly Town.
This town has two subtypes: the too desolate or the too perfect; both descriptors contribute to the ‘something sinister’ that brews beneath the town facade.
The too desolate: everything in the town is drab and dreary, the stores on Main Street are closed and abandoned and everyone questions why they are still there. The perfect place for a meth lab, or a trucking ring involving human trafficking, or a militia, or cult to take and make a strong hold.
Or on the flip side: Everything is too perfect, but you know something isn’t right because it seems as if everyone is trying to hard to be happy. The too perfect is the planned community small town like Victory in Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling where everything is half a bubble off plumb. There is a secret the town is built around.
In either scenario, the townspeople are often victims, and the action is focused on will they or won’t they overcome the darkness/the falseness that is their town.
Books that focus on the desolate small towns or communities can be found in the Jack Reacher novels by Lee Child; there are now 29 Jack Reacher novels. The Killing Floor published in 1997 was made into a tv series by Prime season 2 and 3 followed based on other books. (Reacher is supposed to be giant of a man at 6’5” and strong sense of justice and civility/kindness). These are heavily plot driven with guns and other weapons.
For books with the too perfect towns/communities consider: Lakewood by Megan Giddings The Red Grove by Tessa Fontaine and The Garden by Clare Beams. The too perfect as with the too desolate foster an intense mixture of hope and dread.
Two: The unbelievably idyllic.
This town type seems to always have some kind of festival happening, and where, if it could, it would be perpetually autumn or spring, never too hot or too cold. But there is snow because, well, snow is romantic and magical. The townspeople are quirky, tropey even. They are characters, and the action is character driven. From tv think: Gilmore Girls, Hart of Dixie, The Good Witch Series (Hallmark). These types of small towns with their highly character driven cast, snappy dialogue and witty banter lend themselves better towards film. They are the perfect setting for what is known in Hollywood as the “screwball” comedy or a romance story with the feisty, spit-fire woman protagonist and the local, charming or curmudgeon man thrown together and we are made to wonder if they will ever realize how perfect they are for each other. (The Screwball Comedy is a subgenre of the romance).
For books with this Type Two town vibe and characters try: The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna or Frankly In Love by David Yoon
Three:
This small town is neither without an underbelly nor without a festival; it usually has both. It may have a town gazebo (many small towns have town square and thus a gazebo) but it doesn’t have to have a town square. It might have a community center, or coffee/restaurant or high school sporting venue where many of the characters meet up or brush up against each other. It will have prominent characters (the protagonist and the secondaries and the tertiaries) who are involved in their town, but they are focused on living their lives and overcoming their obstacles while being members of the town. Type Three: The Real Life Fictional small town may be gritty, charming, quaint, and even sparse, but it is real and doesn’t shy away from its realness. Tragic and comic elements co-exist in these towns.
For books with this small-town realness try: The Road to Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett, Unlikely Animals by Annie Hartnett, Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (and Strout’s follow ups to this Crosby, Maine location), Early Morning Riser by Katherine Heiny, Empire Falls by Richard Russo (and Russo’s other novels all very strong in town setting) and Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club by J. Ryan Stradal.
Special Spotlight on National Best Seller: Road to Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett read the Kirkus Review here.
