Trashlands

May 1, 2021

In an environmentally wrecked near-future, plastic is the main currency, and migrant workers like Coral survive by harvesting it from the fields and streams to sell. Coral herself is saving money to rescue her son, kidnapped by child labor traffickers seven years previously, while creating sculptures from refuse that she places anonymously in the woods. (Such is the enduring value of art.) When an accident takes all her savings, Coral must decide whether to become a dancer at Trashlands, the strip joint dominating the garbage dump where she lives. Following the LJ-starred Road out of Winter; with a 50,000-copy first printing.

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Starred review from June 28, 2021
Philip K. Dick Award winner Stine (Road Out of Winter) sets this searing exploration of the lives of women who are mired in grinding poverty in a climate-ravaged near-future where plastic has become humanity’s only currency. The sordid strip club Trashlands in flood-prone “Scrappalachia” serves as the narrative hub as the novel shifts through multiple characters’ recollections and struggles. Among the expansive cast are the good-hearted sex-workers Foxglove and Summer; the vile Rattlesnake Master; single mother Coral, a scavenger of plastic who makes eerie art out of garbage; Coral’s lover, Trillium; the idealistic reporter, Miami; and the aging Mr. Fall, a teacher who agrees to help Coral find her stolen son. “You couldn’t be picky and live” in this rotting junkyard where women are treated as disposable and life comprises a heartbreaking miasma of hunger, yearning, ruthlessness, and compassion. Stine draws on her personal experience of today’s Appalachia to craft a harrowing vision of the future, and at its center is the tug-of-war between what is right and what is necessary to survive. This painful, thought-provoking apocalypse noir fires on all cylinders. Agent: Eric Smith, P.S. Literary.

September 15, 2021
A trash scavenger and a strip club dancer form an alliance of necessity in a post-apocalyptic junkyard. Trashlands is both a massive garbage dump where Coral collects plastic--which has replaced cash as currency--and a strip club where Foxy performs on stage and sells tattoos to men whose names are inked on her body. Coral's plastic makes its way to Dickensian factories where enslaved children remanufacture it into bricks, which are used to replace buildings damaged by severe sea-level rise and flooding. One of the workers is Coral's moody son, Shanghai, whom she's desperate to locate and buy out of the factory. Trashlands' proprietor, Rattlesnake Master, operates the place as a predatory company store and is determined to showcase Coral on his stage. Recollections of how Coral and others came to be trapped in Trashlands are interwoven with episodes of their challenging day-to-day lives. A love match between Mr. Fall, Coral's father figure, and Summer, a club dancer who lives in a food truck, provides a mature perspective. Coincidental meetings, a random act of violence, and unresolved plot points make the ending less satisfying than the rest of Stine's engrossing story. A nicely balanced blend of dystopian tragedy, love, and hope.

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Starred review from September 1, 2021
Coral, like many of the residents of Scrappalachia, is a plucker, picking plastic out of water and forests. Rising tides and floods have moved the East coast further inward and a global ban on plastics production has made existing plastic the only money that matters. The plucked plastic is remade into bricks to rebuild the newly coastal cities. There is, however, no rebuilding of Scrappalachia; there is only hardship, plucking, and fear. Coral is able to find some small beauty by creating art out of plastic that cannot be sold. Other women are not so lucky. Many work in Trashlands, a strip club run by the vile Rattlesnake Master. Men, drawn by the neon lights, come in droves, adding even more danger to the already perilous lives of women in Scrappalachia. In her second dystopian noir novel (after Road out of Winter, 2020), Stine has once again written a thought-provoking, harrowing feminist tale that is a natural extension of our current climate crisis. Beyond the prescient plot, Stine's characters shine with rich interior lives. Like Coral and her art, the characters create love, small comforts, and joy amidst their grueling day-to-day existences. Highly recommended for all fiction collections.

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