Review: "Ghost Town Living" by Brent Underwood

Ghost Town Living by Brent Underwood
Published March 2024 via Harmony
★★★

In 2018, Underwood bought Cerro Gordo, an abandoned mining town high in the California desert. In 2020, he moved there more or less permanently to start restoration and exploration. (He also started a YouTube channel, which is what led to the traction for this book.) I've been looking forward to this book since well before it was announced; it's a hell of a story, no matter which way you slice it, and I was pretty sure it was only a matter of time.

Underwood writes much as he talks—if you watch his videos, you'll recognize the rhythms and generally be able to hear the book as you read. As much as I enjoy the videos, though, I'm not entirely sold on the book structure. Underwood is a good storyteller, but the book is structured more as connected essays than as a chronological memoir, and there are some strange gaps.

Underwood is passionate about this town and its history, and that passion comes through loud and clear, whether he's talking about rebuilding after a fire or the history of water access in the town. (Why water access? Because it's an isolated desert town, and whether in the 1800s or now, accessing it requires feats of logistics and/or engineering.) But...there's never a basic walkthrough of the town. Never a description of a day in the life in an abandoned mining town—or a day in the life of someone working in that town more than a century ago. A fire is mentioned in passing in early chapters, but it's not until chapter nine, which details that fire, that Underwood talks about the importance of the (main) building that was lost. Readers don't have a chance to feel the weight of that loss in the way that Underwood did—to the reader, it might as well be a random old building that wasn't important enough to describe for the first half of the book, or important enough to include in the map at the beginning.

To an extent I get it—the fire is set up (rightly) as a catalyst, and it's easily the most dramatic moment of the book. A chronological structure would have placed it early in the book (just a few months after Underwood moved permanently to the town), leaving little time to build up to it...but as it stands, there aren't really enough details in the first half of the book to build up to it anyway. Even knowing the overall trajectory I think I would have preferred something more linear (and with fewer oblique comments about things that don't get full stories, like relationships that ended badly).

Because of this I struggled to figure out the ideal reader for this. Make no mistake; there are a lot of people who will enjoy this. But is the ideal reader someone who (like me) has already been following along and can fill in the mental gaps—but already knows the general story? (This may be the reason for the non-linear structure...) Or is the ideal reader someone who has seen one or two articles or YouTube videos and doesn't have preconceived notions—but will have to look up the salt tram to be able to understand its isolation, or the American Hotel to understand what it once was?

Probably the answer is somewhere in between. I imagine this book will do well (and that it will be popular among those already familiar with the story), in any case—it's a place and a story to attract dreamers.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.