Smog City
Smog City
Author: Rebecca McNutt
Desc: "Syndrome E meets Marianne Dreams but Smog City incorporates Cape Breton's industrial past with super 8 found footage which puts it in a class all its own." ~Google Blogs Smog City is a Canadian noir novel written by teenage author Rebecca McNutt in 2011 and published in 2015. It tells the story of a misfit but nonetheless average girl who has a friendship with the personification of a hazardous waste site in Sydney an industrial steeltown of Atlantic Canada from the 1980's to 2013. The year is 1986 and there's a surreal number of events hidden in plain sight. Digital is in and traditional is out the world is rapidly changing and Eastern Canada is one of many places caught up in it. Mandy Valems is eighteen planning to go to college soon with dreams of being a photojournalist but the sudden unexplained death of her older brother has left her emotionally scarred. She's also living on Cape Breton Island a small but very industrial place in Atlantic Canada during the environmental movement and the Sydney Tar Ponds case and her best friend Wendy and her grieving parents aren't much help either... then one day Mandy meets an assumed imaginary friend (who is a super 8 film enthusiast) and as she gets older she finds herself falling deeper and deeper into something dangerous involving a dark secret between pollution and nature. She's too old to have an imaginary friend - at least she thinks so - but her friend might be the most real friend she's ever had in the world. The trouble is he's got the promise of certain death looming over him unless Mandy can do something to help. Traveling through shocking VHS found footage and nostalgic memories of the past her confusing life gets out of control and she begins to question society in general - and whether or not the rapid and thoughtless conversion of everything to digital technology is dooming the world. Smog City takes Cape Breton's extensive steelmaking past past and 20th century nostalgia to a whole different level one where pollution has emotion and two friends try their best to survive in a place where everything is changing.