"Utopia, Iowa"

Brian Yansky is the author of Alien Invasion and Other Inconveniences and its sequel, Homicidal Aliens and Other Disappointments, as well as Wonders of the World and My Road Trip to the Pretty Girl Capital of the World. His new novel is Utopia, Iowa.

Yansky applied the Page 69 Test to Utopia, Iowa and reported the following:

Page 69 of Utopia, Iowa, reflects the novel in some ways but not in others. Page 69 is comic and there are lots of comic moments in the novel. Page 69 is in a classroom at school; there are also several pages in the novel set in school—so it is representative of that. My character is, in some ways, the average teen on page 69—at school, joking with friends. But what this page doesn’t show is that he’s many other things. He’s also a boy who sees ghosts, more specifically two dead girls who want him to help them find their murderers, and who is himself being pursued by a dark force creeping into town. Page 69 reflects the strand of the novel that is ordinary and the style of the novel, but not the fantastical elements and the strangeness of Utopia, Iowa. Hey, it’s just one page. I do my best to weave several stories together in this novel, some realistic and some fantastical.

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--Marshal Zeringue