Slime Line - Paperback – The Tale Trade

Slime Line - Paperback

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by Jake Maynard (Author)

Equal parts workplace satire and character study in delusion, Slime Line is a fresh and urgently needed examination of work, grief, the male ego, and the false promise of environmental capitalism.

A fresh and trippy portrait of the diverse underclass of the commercial fishing industry, Slime Line is a tragicomedy of one college dropout's attempts to remake himself into a hard-nosed workingman.

Fleeing the aftermath of a bizarre college prank and mourning the death of his deadbeat dad, Garrett Deaver escapes Pennsylvania for a salmon processing plant in remote Alaska, a state he has only known from his father's stories. There he renames himself Beaver--just like a beaver, he's "an industrious motherf*cker"--and he connives to become a supervisor at Klak Fancy Salmon, LLC, thinking it will solve his psychological and financial issues. He soon falls in with an entrepreneurial Turkish fish processor and a cynical old woman who mends nets and tells filthy jokes. In these two, he finds solidarity, or even friendship, for the first time in his life.

But the methamphetamines Garrett uses to work long hours delude his thinking, and an old photo on the wall of a bar contradicts his dad's stories. When sabotage at the plant sets his new friends at odds with management and an ensuing act of violence disrupts his schemes, Garrett is set on a path toward reckoning with his dad's secret legacy and the mythos of rugged individualism he'd always believed.

Back Jacket

A trippy and darkly funny portrait of the commercial fishing industry, Slime Line is the tragicomic yarn of one troubled college dropout's desperate attempts to remake himself into a hard-nosed working man.

In the wake of his father's death, Garrett Deaver washes up at a salmon processing plant in his dad's old stomping grounds of Alaska. There, he renames himself Beaver--because just like a beaver, he's "an industrious motherfucker"-- and vows to become a supervisor at Klak Fancy Salmon, LLC. But moving up within the industry's seasonal underclass is anything but simple, and soon he finds himself with real, and imagined, enemies at the plant. As amphetamines scramble his sense of reality, and secrets about his father's life are revealed, the job he'd hoped would bring him salvation threatens to leave him broke, alone, and--maybe even literally--underwater.

Author Biography

Jake Maynard is a writer from rural Pennsylvania whose stories and essays appear in Guernica, Southern Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Electric Lit, The New Republic, The New York Times, and others. His experiences working in the commercial fishing industry inspired his debut novel, Slime Line.

Number of Pages: 344

Dimensions: 0.87 x 8.19 x 5.51 IN

Publication Date: June 01, 2024