\The Keepers of Truth"" begins ominously enough. Michael Collins posts the warning of a plague on the first page and warns all wary readers to keep out lest they catch the epidemic of the place they are about to enter. Fortunately, the story is engaging and honest enough to get you past the first warnings and into the rest of the novel.
The story follows Bill, a reporter for the small-town newspaper, The Daily Truth. Bill is stuck in an endless stream of reporting the mundane events that give a small town a pulse. That small town, however, is slowly bleeding away into nothingness. Bill's sarcasm seeps through in headlines he knows he will never run (""AUXILIARY FIREMEN'S WIVES SELL THEIR BUNS FOR CHARITY"" and ""THE 'TRUTH' IS DEAD""). The newspaper is failing and he senses this with the police records that turn into stories and the droning voice of the TV news anchor drawing people away from the printed word.
Suddenly the murder of Old Man Lawton shakes the town to its decaying foundations. Instantly, The Daily Truth picks up on this event and sees it as a chance to draw breath instead of choking on its own phlegm. The murder wakes up the editor, Sam Perkins, and revives Bill. They see a tragic and grisly death as a way to capitalize on dwindling readership and keep themselves afloat.
The suspect in the Lawton murder is Ronny Lawton, the son of the victim. Ronny is a troublemaker and one of the many discontented middle-aged men trying to find a way out of a dead-end town. The ensuing investigation, seen through the prying eyes of a reporter trying to find the next item for the Truth, provides ample room for an examination into Bill's own motives. With Ronny's celebrity status upon his release and Bill's obsession with the case, the line between investigation and story quickly becomes blurred.
The book's greatest strength is its location. Though the town is never named, it takes on a feeling of eerie accuracy. The town is a shell of what was once a great industrial powerhouse. Collins says it had ""perpetual motion ... compact and inexhaustible, self-sustaining, the eternal stoking of furnaces."" He goes on to say that the town thought it was invincible and the products would never stop rolling off the assembly lines. Of course, that illusion could only disappear.
Now the town seems to be an endless row of warehouses with their windows smashed in and doors rusted off the hinges. Smokestacks stand empty and the machinery is stripped of any usefulness it had. It almost seems as if there has been an apocalypse in the business park. Sadly, that same corrosion has eaten away at the town itself.
The streets are breaking out in an infection of potholes and widening cracks. The virus of economic fallout reaches to either side of the streets with the state of business. Main Street has disappeared from the center of town and all commerce lies along the highway. Instead of the local cafes a legion of national chains comes. Meanwhile, the people are lost in their own hometown and cannot seem to find their way out. Bill recognizes all this and ponders this deeply while trying to find his own way out.
The paradox of Bill's situation is that he is caught in the same town of the people he is fond of criticizing. In a particularly brutal passage, Bill goes on about a scene in the Denny's where Ronny Lawton works. The men are mired in their own loneliness while the baggy-eyed waitresses must put up with every indiscretion and refill their coffee too. Bill blasts this attitude of macho bravado with a short exploration on the ""insomnia of disaffection.""
Outside of Bill's own biting observations comes the tale of Ronny Lawton. Ronny is a man who is a step away from his breaking point and seems to be holding himself on the edge. He is one of the many men who went from a secure worker in an assembly plant to an unskilled waiter at a restaurant that is void of identity. Lawton becomes the main suspect because he seems to be one of the men who can hide in the shadows he casts. He is a bulky and uneducated behemoth of a man who seems to be misunderstood but thoroughly explained.
Like the entire novel, Lawton withstands extensive analysis only to emerge with his secrets intact. Because the murder winds deeper and the story more complex, answers are never easy and the truth must be understood with Bill's extensive essays on the rusted American dream. The entire book captures the sour taste of a town collapsing slowly and rotting from the inside out.
""The Keepers of Truth"" moves along at a rambling pace that crashes against its finale. The murky descriptions provide a picture with the frame etched in the darkest hue of gray. The characters have tremendous depth and fill up the landscape in a thoroughly believable setting. The book is at once a searing indictment of the lost promise of industry and the desperation of the people put out on their wornaway sidewalks. The plague has consumed the town and it is now choking off all its people.
