The Auctioneer: A Good Book for Independence Day

The Auctioneer was a brief bestseller in1975 and then promptly forgotten-- perhaps because the youngish author, Joan Samson, soon after died of cancer-- but it's been reissued (with a Grady Hendrix intro) and it's more appropriate than ever; it's about Harlowe-- a small town in New Hampshire experiencing change-- there was a back-to-the - movement in the 60s and 70s that brought new people and culture to rural America, city slickers . . . and the city slicker in this novel is a menacing, Trump-like auctioneer who becomes very close with the chief of police . . . and then bad things start to happen, very bad things; it's allegorical like Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" and the prose is spare like later Cormac McCarthy books; it's the opposite of Jack Ketchum's Off Season-- which is about not messing with the locals-- in this book, the locals are messed with and messed with, not unlike what's happened in current rural America-- and there's eventually going to be some sort of falling out and it might be liberating but it also might be ugly.