The WVU Press has released “Slime Line,” the first novel written by University creative writing alumnus Jake Maynard.
A trippy and darkly funny portrait of the commercial fishing industry, “Slime Line” is the tragicomic yarn of one troubled college dropout’s desperate attempts to remake himself into a hard-nosed working man.
The Pittsburgh resident was inspired to write the book by his experiences in Alaska as a seasonal worker.
“I was in college during ‘the great recession’ and really broke,” Maynard said. “One summer, I got a job in a salmon processor in Bristol Bay, a lot like the one in the book — long hours alongside international workers, sleeping in bunkhouses, buying stuff from the overpriced company store, crap pay, but lots of overtime, etc. I ended up loving Alaska, though, and spent more summers doing other seasonal work up there — tourism work, agriculture, whatever I could find.”
Maynard used his experiences to fuel the novel, which Kim Kelly, the author of “Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor,” has called “an arresting read that sinks its claws deep into your gut and dares you to blink.”
In the wake of his father’s death, the main character Garrett Deaver washes up at a salmon processing plant in his dad’s old stomping grounds of Alaska. There, he renames himself Beaver because “he’s industrious, just like a beaver” and vows to become a supervisor at Klak Fancy Salmon, LLC.
But moving up within the industry’s seasonal underclass is anything but simple, and soon he finds himself with real and imagined enemies at the plant. As amphetamines scramble his sense of reality and secrets about his father’s life are revealed, the job he’d hoped would bring him salvation threatens to leave him broke, alone and maybe even literally underwater.
The book has been dubbed an instant “cult classic” by Lee Durkee, author of “The Last Taxi Driver” and “Stalking Shakespeare.” “Sinclair and Steinbeck would applaud this novel’s eye,” writes Durkee. “But it’s Maynard’s outrageous characters loosed upon the Alaskan seacoast that propel ‘Slime Line’ into page-turning madness. Maynard gets every word right.”
“For a while, I felt squeamish to write about Alaska when my experience there was so seasonal,” Maynard said. “But eventually I realized that seasonal work has always been the experience of many non-Indigenous people there. From trappers to fishermen to processors to pipeline workers and now, increasingly, tourism workers, the state depends on people coming and going seasonally. ‘Slime Line’ is about those people.”
Find the book at WVU Press or all major retail outlets.