It’s the summer of 1980 in Cleveland, Ohio, and Phoebe Shaw and her best friend Jacqueline have just graduated high school, only to confront an ugly, uncertain future. Across the city, abandoned factories populate the skyline; meanwhile at the shore, one strong spark, and the Cuyahoga River might catch fire. But none of that compares to what’s happening in their own west side neighborhood. The girls Phoebe and Jacqueline have grown up with are changing. It starts with footprints of dark water on the sidewalk. Then, one by one, the girls’ bodies wither away, their fingernails turning to broken glass, and their bones exposed like corroded metal beneath their flesh. 
As rumors spread about the grotesque transformations, soon everyone from nosy tourists to clinic doctors and government men start arriving on Denton Street, eager to catch sight of “the Rust Maidens” in metamorphosis. But even with all the onlookers, nobody can explain what’s happening or why – except perhaps the Rust Maidens themselves. Whispering in secret, they know more than they’re telling, and Phoebe realizes her former friends are quietly preparing for something that will tear their neighborhood apart. 
Alternating between past and present, Phoebe struggles to unravel the mystery of the Rust Maidens – and her own unwitting role in the transformations – before she loses everything she’s held dear: her home, her best friend, and even perhaps her own body.

IN A NUTSHELL
‘The Rust Maidens’ is powered by rage. Rage at how young girls are treated. Rage at how the cycle of poverty and despair repeats itself. Rage at the lies people tell themselves in an effort not to be overwhelmed by helplessness. The story is an amalgam of gritty realism and metaphor-made-flesh. The prose is mesmerising. The emotions are raw. Told in two timelines by a woman in her middle age looking back on her teens, it reads not so much as a thriller but as an apology or a penance for things done or not done, that cannot be changed.

When I read the description of ‘The Rust Maidens’ and saw that it had won the  Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel (2018), I assumed that the horror at the heart of this book would at the transformation of teenage girls into monsters made of flesh and bone and rusted steel and broken glass but it’s not. The horror comes from seeing the cycle of recession and loss and anger and helplessness that created the Rust Belt failed these girls, and destroyed the communities they were raised in and in knowing that the cycle will repeat and that working people are unable to stop it..

This is a very accessible book. The suburbs of Cleveland, both in the 1980s and today, are vividly drawn and easy to relate to. It’s a very personal story, told by Pheobe Shaw who has returned, for the first time in decades to her childhood home, days before it and the rest of the neighbourhood she grew up in are scheduled for demolition. It’s told in two timelines, Pheobe’s present-day return to the wreckage of a life she’s been trying to forget and her memories of 1980, the summer of the Rust Maidens, and the guilt she still feels about what she did and what she didn’t do.

Although most of the narrative is firmly based in a gritty realism, the Rust Maidens push the envelope of the story and the reader’s imagination. They are both a horrifying reality and a metsphor made of flesh and steel. To me, it felt like they were there to force me not to settle too easily into a story of poverty caused by the cycles of capitalism but to be sensitive to the grief and loss and helplessness of the people trapped by those cycles. They are the product of taken-for-granted misogyny, communal pressures to conform and pretend that nothing is wrong and the normalisation of the girls having no choice over what happens to them.

I often struggle with novels that combine realism with metaphor.Hrre it was so well done that I accepted the metaphor as an expression of reality, a distillation of the truth of the experience.

Gwendolyn Kiste’s writing is deeply compelling. She tells the story with barbed-wire sentences, bloodied with mundane but bitter truths, that lacerated my emotions as I read. Her prose mesmerised me, holding my imagination still while I waited for the narrative to strike.

I loved how the rage beneath the skin of the story pushed to the surface from time to time, like the glass and metal pushing through the Rust Maidens’ flesh. It’s a rage at the unfairness of life, at the girls’ lack of choice and at the abundance of blame. The Rust Maidens are the product of this rage. They embody its pain and perhaps offer the only possible escape route. I think that what the Rust Maidens ultimately show Pheobe, after years of guilt and grief, is that hope may not take the shape you expect.