Gunty investigates economic strain in the U.S. heartland by taking readers to Vacca Vale, IN, a once thriving industrial center that's turned to rust. Homing in on a tumble-down apartment building called the Rabbit Hutch, she presents mostly older residents with no place else to go but also introduces the four teenagers in Apt. C4, who have recently aged out of the state's foster care system. Along with three boys, they include the bright, damaged, ambitiously hopeful heart of the matter, a girl named Blandine.

Vacca Vale, a dying small town in Indiana, is home to La Lapiniere Affordable Housing Complex, which residents call The Rabbit Hutch. Readers of this remarkable first novel will meet a clutch of its residents; chief among them is Blandine Watkins, a brilliant, ethereal 18 year old who is captivated by female mystics, especially Hildegard von Bingen. Blandine shares her apartment with three 19-year-old boys: Todd, Malik, and Jack, the latter of whom narrates a part of the novel. Blandine--consider her a mystic manqué--longs to exit her body but is haunted by a sexual encounter she had with James, her married high-school drama coach. Other characters include neighbor Joan, who works screening obituaries; Hope, a young mother who is afraid of her baby's eyes; and Moses Blitz, "the abominable glow man." The brilliantly imaginative novel begins on an absurdist note before settling down to an offbeat, slightly skewed realism. Gunty is a wonderful writer, a master of the artful phrase: "her voice is like a communion wafer: tasteless, light"; a car is "red and glossy as wealth"; "the architecture is Gothic on a budget." Best of all, her fully realized characters come alive on the page, capturing the reader and not letting go.

Gunty debuts with an astonishing portrait of economically depressed Vacca Vale, Ind., centered on the residents of a subsidized apartment building nicknamed the Rabbit Hutch. The main character is 18-year-old Blandine Watkins, who grew up in foster care and dropped out of high school in junior year. In the opening scene, she is stabbed in her apartment by an unidentified assailant. Gradually, the causes of the crime emerge, followed eventually by the facts, as well as her fate. Along the way, Gunty delves into the stories of Blandine's neighbors, brilliantly and achingly charting the range of their experiences. An erotic flashback of an infant's conception at a motel on higher ground in Vacca Vale called the Wooden Lady ("It's like if manslaughter were a place," one reviewer describes it), where married couple Hope and Anthony hole up during a "1,000-year flood," contrasts with a devastatingly banal and ultimately traumatic sexual encounter between Blandine and her drama teacher the year before. There's also a lonely woman who lives in a state of "flammable peace" due to her sensitivity to noise, with whom Blandine shares her fascination with Catholic mystics before going off to sabotage a celebration involving the city's gentrification scheme with voodoo dolls and fake blood. It all ties together, achieving this first novelist's maximalist ambitions and making powerful use of language along the way. Readers will be breathless. (Aug.)

An ensemble of oddballs occupies a dilapidated building in a crumbling Midwest city. An 18-year-old girl is having an out-of-body experience; a sleep-deprived young mother is terrified of her newborn's eyes; someone has sabotaged a meeting of developers with fake blood and voodoo dolls; a lonely woman makes a living deleting comments from an obituary website; a man with a mental health blog covers himself in glow stick liquid and terrorizes people in their homes. In this darkly funny, surprising, and mesmerizing novel, there are perhaps too many overlapping plots to summarize concisely, most centering around an affordable housing complex called La Lapinière, or the Rabbit Hutch, located in the fictional Vacca Vale, Indiana. The novel has a playful formal inventiveness (the chapters hop among perspectives, mediums, tenses--one is told only in drawings done with black marker) that echoes the experiences of the building's residents, who live "between cheap walls that isolate not a single life from another." Gunty pans swiftly from room to room, perspective to perspective, molding a story that--despite its chaotic variousness--is extremely suspenseful and culminates in a finale that will leave readers breathless. With sharp prose and startling imagery, the novel touches on subjects from environmental trauma to rampant consumerism to sexual power dynamics to mysticism to mental illness, all with an astonishing wisdom and imaginativeness. "This is an American story," a character hears on a TV ad. "And you are the main character." In the end, this is indeed an American story--a striking and wise depiction of what it means to be awake and alive in a dying building, city, nation, and world. A stunning and original debut that is as smart as it is entertaining. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.