Dead Stars tells the story of an angry man searching for his missing son in a hostile factory town dedicated to the nuclear military industry.
“There are always accidents at the Plains, especially in building 771. It’s a rather unusual mechanical workshop. A workshop in which plutonium transported by freight train from Washington state is compressed and hammered into small balls the size of a softball, along a production line that conveys them from airtight glove boxes in an airtight glove box, so that the finished balls can be sent to Texas, where they are put in bombs (…). Everyone calls it the Snakes’ Nest because of the mess of winding and tangled pipes everywhere under the high ceiling. It was state-of-the-art when it was built, but that was 1952, and today there’s not a single glove box or chain conveyor that isn’t in danger of falling apart. »
At the beginning of the 1950s, the Stonewall company arrived on the stony lands of northwest Colorado and built the Plains from scratch, a plutonium processing plant intended for the military nuclear industry – due to the Cold War. A complete workers’ town, totally dedicated to this industry, then emerged next to the factory: Plainview.
The Turner family lived in the area before the company was established. With the arrival of Stonewall, the father, a tyrannical and brutal type, abandoned breeding for a more lucrative business, such as trafficking in alcohol, then drugs, accompanied in this path by his youngest son, Whitney. The eldest, Hack, for his part distanced himself from his father and tried to join the pro rodeo circuit, near Boulder or Denver. In vain ! Married to a drug addict woman, who disappeared from traffic, Hack, with two children on his hands, had to give up his cowboy dreams and resolve to go to work in the Plains, to work today at the famous building 771 , dismal and dangerously dilapidated.
In Plainview, Hack is not exactly in the odor of holiness. His rather rough character, his restless youth, and his father’s reputation weigh on his shoulders. The fact that he recently revealed to a journalist a serious accident suffered by one of his workshop colleagues does not help matters and makes him a traitor and a pariah in the eyes of many of his fellow citizens. On September 7, 1986, Hack was away when his eldest daughter Nat, 17 (and a bottle of vodka under the bed), called him: Randy, the youngest, 14, hadn’t come home. Alone against almost everyone, in a hostile city, Hack, a true “father of courage”, will do everything to find this son who seems to have disappeared.
With this twilight and traumatic new novel, Benjamin Whitmer closes in apotheosis a formidable series devoted to “company towns”, these towns built around a factory, a trilogy begun in 2018 with Évasion and extended with Les Dynamiteurs. Dead Stars retraces, in a dazzling style (and often scathing: the formulas click), the pathetic quest of an angry man, swallowing at every moment a rage that tastes like bile, and delicately paints the poignant portrait of a family painfully united and deeply dysfunctional. But this wonderful noir novel goes even further.
Through the historical evocation of the military nuclear industry (evocation discreetly supported by solid documentation), he combines the small story with the big one, under the eye of a bravado Ronald Reagan. With Dead Stars, Benjamin Whitmer has undoubtedly just written his most ambitious and accomplished book to date.
A book released in several European countries, but which, like the previous ones, has still not found a publisher in the United States. No one is a prophet, etc.
Philippe Blanchet
Find this review of Dead Stars by Benjamin Whitmer in our issue 163, available on newsstands and via our online store.
