210 pgs
The Mahoning Valley has always been haunted.
Steel mills collapsed into silence, slag heaps groan in the dark, and old neighborhoods remember more than they should. In these pages, folklore and ruin intertwine-stories of strange lights, whispered warnings, and creatures that rise from the poisoned earth.
Rust Belt Gothic: Volume 1, Book 1 collects twenty chilling tales rooted in the shadows of Ohio’s post-industrial heartland. From cursed graffiti beneath the bridges to the restless echoes in Mill Creek’s woods, each story twists familiar streets and landmarks into something uncanny, where the line between memory and nightmare is dangerously thin.
This is horror forged in rust.
These stories are part of the Rust Belt Gothic project, an ongoing effort to explore, preserve, and reimagine community memory across the Mahoning Valley. This work intentionally incorporates real people, places, and events alongside fictional, supernatural, and allegorical elements.
While some individuals and landmarks appear as themselves, their presence here is woven into a larger artistic narrative that should not be read as literal documentation. The speculative elements – monsters, hauntings, transformations – are inventions meant to highlight deeper truths about memory, loss, and preservation in post-industrial communities.This story is not history, though it draws from it; nor is it journalism, though it touches real lives. It is fiction as archive: a bridge between fact and folklore, intended to honor the legacies of the Valley and beyond and to carry them forward in a living mythos.
These stories are a work of fiction created for the Rust Belt Gothic project. While it incorporates real people and places, it should be read as allegory, not journalism.
CONTENTS:
The Slag Heap Heart
The Acid Etch
The Olfactory Echo
The Whispering Woods of Mill Creek
The Pale Crawlers
The Stain Below
The Drain Singer
The Iridescent Ditch
The Children of Covington
The Subterranean Anomaly
River of Wrong Reflections
The Scrabblers of Packard
The White Dissolve
The Warren Aviary
The Fourth Floor Flux
The Endless Benediction
The Lacquered Glass
Miss Eleanor’s Eyes
The Wick Avenue Fountain