Read part 1 here, and a sidebar post on the music of Exorcist II: The Heretic here.

In a Washington Post story about J.D. Vance’s run for office, I first encountered the term ruin porn. lf you’ve read his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, you’ll know what the term means: a tour through ruined rural America, where everything that once thrived is gone, and the people left are mired in unemployment, addiction, and crime. It’s both insulting and accurate, and it makes Vance both the herald of this new rural America, and another of the vampires feeding off it.

I like to say I grew up in a small Tennessee town of 350 people, 250 of whom were related to me. If nothing else, that limits your dating options…or should. But the speed trap/wide spot in the road I called home, Gibson, was equidistant between two other towns, Humboldt and Milan, and I grew familiar with both since Gibson lacked essentials like a grocery store, school, or doctors. Or much of anything else. 

I left Gibson when I went to college, and over the decades my visits became fewer and fewer, until my mother’s growing infirmities meant I had to return to take over certain things she could no longer manage. I found myself, as you do, rerunning the old back roads and finding that most of the landmarks I recalled were long gone.

But not all of them.

Both Humboldt and Milan had Walmarts as far back as I can remember as well. This was the original Walmart, a small but useful store that blended into the retail landscape and allowed other businesses to breathe. We shopped there, but we also shopped at grocery stores, drug stores, hardware stores, auto parts stores, a whole thriving small-town economy.

After I left, though—and to hear my late stepfather tell it, after the death of founder Sam Walton—Walmart changed into the all-consuming monster we know today. With the advent of the 24-hour “super-store,” where shoppers could buy everything at cheaper prices any time of day or night, all those other businesses died. Along with them went the jobs they created, and the pride of those owners and workers. Many no doubt ended up working for Walmart, “feeding the beast that killed them,” as a character put it on King of the Hill.

As a result, these towns became zombies of their former selves. Abandoned and empty houses filled up once-vibrant neighborhoods, pawn shops and antique (i.e., junk) stores sprang up in what were once downtown businesses, and check-cashing operations made their fortunes off the community’s desperation. There were attempts at rejuvenation, but they were spotty and ultimately helped only a small part of the community.

This isn’t just hearsay. I saw it. And it stuck with me for years.

I knew I wanted to write about this, but I’m no Upton Sinclair; social treatises disguised as novels don’t interest me. I mean, honestly, who would want to read that? So it sat in my head until it finally connected with another subject I’d always wanted to write about, demonic possession. Because one day, it hit me: what if, instead of being just an economic hell mouth, a big box store was a literal one, a place where demons congregated to await the chance to possess their victims?

It’s a silly idea on the surface, I suppose. After all, no business is inherently evil, and many people would not be able to afford essentials if it wasn’t for Walmart, Target, et. al. But when you see the destruction wrought by big boxes’ appeal to cheapness at all costs (and the simultaneous appeal to people’s basest instincts), it’s hard not to feel that it’s somehow responsible. 

And in my novel Dandelion, it most definitely is.