Uptown Pony (gift with purchase)

The town did not come back from the dead. It came back from the county records.

The first deed from Uptown Pony arrives at the Madison County clerk’s office folded into thirds, smelling faintly of blasting powder and witnessed by two men dead for more than a century.

By the time title examiner June Halvorsen reaches Pony, an entire mining town has appeared on the mountainside above it. Uptown has streets, banks, hospitals, working mines and nearly five thousand residents who insist they have been there since 1895.

Their documents support every word.

Each time a bank accepts Uptown’s gold, a tourist rents one of its rooms or a government office recognizes one of its claims, the vanished town becomes more real. Its streets spread farther down the mountain. Its population grows. Present-day Pony begins disappearing from maps, property records and memory.

Then June discovers that Uptown was not abandoned.

It was erased.

Now two lawful versions of the same town are competing for the same land, the same history and the same people. The Office of Consequence can suppress Uptown again, but doing so would condemn thousands of living residents to a second disappearance.

And Uptown has returned someone June buried six years ago.

To save either town, June must decide whether a person is made real by a legal record, by another person’s memory, or by being chosen when only one version of the past can survive.

Darkly funny, unsettling and unexpectedly moving, Uptown Pony is a supernatural crime story about contradictory histories, weaponized bureaucracy and the terrible power of deciding whose existence counts

For readers who like:

• Impossible towns and altered histories
• Supernatural mysteries governed by precise rules
• Government agencies confronting problems reality was not designed to contain
• Dry institutional humor
• Moral decisions with no clean answer
• Standalone stories that combine crime, horror and the uncanny

Part of The Pending World, where a missing hour leaves behind a second crime scene. and the Office of Consequence arrives to determine what the world has done.

Reality accepted the deed. The town followed.