Salvatore Difalco
ISBN 978-1-77126-085-5
$20.00 CDN/USA
250 pages
It is 1980. The buildings and storefronts at Barton Street and Sherman Avenue are dilapidated remnants of Hamilton’s once-thriving steel industry. The corner is also the nexus of a violent street gang that has left citizens terrorized and police impotent. Mean Season chronicles the random beatings, arson, sexual assaults, and other unfathomable violence of that time in the city’s history, as Bobby Sferazza, a smart, tough, football-playing University of Toronto student, returns home to take a summer job as a night-club bouncer. As he attempts to help his widowed mother with his wayward kid brother, his take-no-prisoners mind-set leaves him entangled in drugs and gangs, with his bright future caught in the crossfire.
Praise for Salvatore Difalco’s previous work
“Difalco is at his strongest when writing about relationships—focusing upon the inherent drama of tight-knit Italian families, couples on the rock, or even corpulent characters’ relationships to food and their own bodies. Let’s continue to hope he continues to mine the strange lives of his particular brand of disenfranchised heroes. In all that roughness, there are diamonds.”
—Quill & Quire
“These are thoughtful, enigmatic stories drawing the reader in with sharp detail, poetic phrasing and recognizable characters. Though we’re dealing with thugs, prostitutes and crackheads, they are all folks you’ll feel uncomfortably at home with. That’s Difalco’s magic: scrape characters from the bottom of society’s bowl and reveal them in literary daylight as powerless dreamers, failed mothers, caged creatures.”
—Front & Centre
