The Prisoners of Stewartville is a beautifully written novella about a town buried beneath a cloud of despair and desperation. Getting out alive and healthy doesn’t really happen in Stewartville. You either work in the prison, have an incarcerated relative or become an inmate yourself. But our young narrator Casey hopes to get out of the stifling grasp of its looming presence someday. 

The book begins when our young narrator and his friend Denny, who is very new to this awful town, discover a big black hole in Denny’s basement when his mom tosses her steel-toed workboot at Denny’s head but misses and knocks some bricks loose instead. What’s a boy to do but investigate this possible portal to hell?!  But Casey has lived here his entire life and he knows with every bone in his body that nothing good can come out of crawling into that hole and he Hell Noes himself right out of that basement because he’s unwilling to tempt fate and discover something so terrible that it had to be bricked up! Soon after everything gets even shittier and creepier.

This novella set me up for a spooky boyhood adventure and some of the dialogue was hilariously delightful but what actually occurs is much more insidious and painfully emotional than I ever imagined and to say much else will ruin it so I won’t be the jerk who does that today. 

There’s a lot going on in this town and none of it is good. It’s a bleak and brutal read about a town infested with poverty, hopelessness, and despair. You’ll care about the narrator, you’ll hope he’s able to overcome everything thrown at him and you’ll probably want to crawl into a big ball of sad quite a few times as the story unfolds and everything he’s really dealing with here is revealed.

This well thought out and excellently written debut is one that I can easily recommend to dark fiction fans. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ ½ stars.