"You need to know what once was there, or you will never notice anything. You'll likely just drive through it, up the steep curve of the mountain, on the new highway, not knowing there's an old highway - paint-sprayed and cracked, behind the trees - that had to be abandoned. The whole thing looks like hills and brush."

Desolate. Barren. Bleak. Devastating. Those are the first words conjured when thinking about Failure To Thrive. This is a quiet, harrowing and deeply unsettling yet, painfully beautiful story of a rotting, decaying and deteriorating coal town, whose residents seem unable to fight against the regressive state of their lives. It's realist fiction, there's a rich, deep history to this novel, there's troves of small town gossip and badly kept secrets, there's the hapless inhabitants of the town just trying to survive. Meghan Lamb has somehow managed to breathe life into the mundane, taking something that should be tedious and dull and creating something so captivating and marvelous from it instead. Behind each rotting door and broken window, despite their crushing circumstances and the constantly gray skies, there are people who rise to face the day. This is their story.

Failure to Thrive captures that specific feeling of misery that I seek in fiction, a feeling so rarely found. All possible boundaries, all conventionality, lies in ruin, smudged, practically rubbed away for this enrapturing and depressing story. On the surface it feels all very nihilistic, but, it's actually not, because there is a point to the lives of these characters. In the end, it's all about survival, really. Somehow, this novel feels so rich and dense and yet so, devoid of anything. Failure to Thrive is a novel of tragedy, of pain and sadness and ruined lives and broken hearts, it's so, so crushingly somber that it practically radiates sorrow. Megan Lamb has crafted something wondrous, a story that's both believable and still sinks its hooks into our flesh.

 

It's heart-breaking, soul-shattering, it's absolutely glorious. Reading this novel makes you feel as if you've been hollowed out, as if your soul has been removed, it makes you feel as if you're being swallowed by the coal town, as if you're nothing but a ghost, fading into the nothingness. This could easily be a novel about a real town, we could so very easily, be visiting the lives of real people, that's the true beauty of it all. It's simply a sad, sad look at a waste of potential. Standing witness to the slow decline of these characters, unable to intervene as their lives crumble, it's something striking and poetic and all too affecting.

Failure to Thrive occupies a space in literature in which there is a massive, yawning gap. We need more novels such as this one, they're more than simply books, they are works of art, ones that leave us with an almost impossible to describe level of melancholy. They say the devil is in the details, but here, the devil lies in the subtleties, in the death and decay captured by this novel. It's a wholly unsettling thing, a grim, wonderful, euphoric read about the final breaths of small town America. If there's one last book you're going to read, make it this one.

"It is a late fall night. The smell of burning leaves has been replaced by smells of burnt ash buried underneath the frost. The cold damp of the wind picks up the coal dust. David thinks, it is a lonely smell, the coal dust blowing in the cold. He thinks about the old coal fireplace his parents used to use. It was a pain to load, and to clean, and honestly, it smelled bad. But he feels strange now, standing in his own front yard, with his own family, looking down at the town, breathing the lonely cold."