Rod Raglin
This blog will touch on the experiences I have as a writer (not to be mistaken for my experience as a writer, i.e. how many books I've written, etc); the pleasure and the pain, the joy and the grief, the satisfaction and the frustration, the magic and the reality - have I left anything out, oh yeah, the rejection, rejection and more rejection, the humiliation and the embarrassment, the jealousy and the resentment - that pretty much covers it, except for why I do it which perhaps I'll realize along the way. Are you totally confused? Good, let's begin.
Mutane Town chilling blend of fact and fiction
What kind of people would choose to live in such a toxic environment,
even fight to stay there?
What’s wrong with them?
What are they hiding?
It’s 1975 and the American military is about to undertake a two-day top-secret mission. It involves helicopter insertion of a four-man camera crew in full battle gear into a government-ordered abandoned town. Their assignment is to film any evidence of anyone still there, then return and report their findings.
The town is Boston Mills, Ohio.
Chief Corporal Mason Wyatt and his three-man team have been cautioned that those who are left may not appreciate them coming it. In which case they could be armed.
But as far as the unit is concerned, this mission is just routine. After all, this is Ohio, not hillbilly country or Vietnam, and it’s only for 28 hours. It can’t be dangerous. It will be a cakewalk.
But Boston Mills isn’t just another hamlet in the rural Midwest. It’s now known as “Hell Town” and is home to a hazardous waste dump where the nearby river is so polluted it can actually be lit on fire. The poisoned environment smells like sulphur and has propagated mutant weeds that have overrun the landscape growing up through asphalt and blocking roads.
What kind of people would choose to live in such a toxic environment, even fight to stay there? What’s wrong with them? What are they hiding?
Corporal Mason and his team are about to find out.
Mutane Town is Clark Wilkins at his best, blending fact with fiction creating the eerie feeling perhaps the author has some insight into these macabre actual events that are the basis of many of his stories.
His extensive research and use of bona fide findings from government reports give this fast passed story a chilling sense of authenticity. Indeed, as Wilkins points out, what the reports don’t reveal is even more disturbing.
