Winner of the Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY) Bronze Medal for Best Regional Fiction.
In Latonia City, Pennsylvania, the past doesn't rest-it seeps up like crude.
In 2019, a reluctant writer returns to his hometown paper. In 1939, a boy hatches a plan to sneak into a jazz show. And on a rainy night in 1982, a college student picks up a bloodied hitchhiker. These three men share two things in common: their last name, and a longing to reconcile with fathers they don't understand. Three men. Three eras. One legacy they can't outrun. Each story is a thread woven into the legacy of the MacCulloch family - dreamers, laborers, and survivors of Pennsylvania's Rust Belt, haunted by a curse that spans decades. Through shifting perspectives, their journeys illuminate the cost of progress, the ache of memory, and the stubborn hope that refuses to die. Set along the Allegheny River in Pennsylvania's oil region,
Rust on the Allegheny
is a multi-generational family saga filled with Rust Belt history, small-town secrets, and the haunting weight of the past. Steeped in the grit of America's industrial heartland, it captures a community clinging to memory while facing an uncertain future, in the quiet decay of moldering Victorian manors and empty Art Deco theaters in an American town that once pulsed with life. Rich, atmospheric, and deeply human,
will resonate with readers of character-driven historical fiction, American family sagas, and small-town dramas where history refuses to stay buried.