{"product_id":"uptownpony","title":"Uptown Pony (gift with purchase)","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe town did not come back from the dead. It came back from the county records.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe first deed from \u003cstrong\u003eUptown Pony\u003c\/strong\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBy 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTheir documents support every word.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEach 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThen June discovers that Uptown was not abandoned.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt was erased.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNow 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAnd Uptown has returned someone June buried six years ago.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTo 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDarkly funny, unsettling and unexpectedly moving, \u003cstrong\u003eUptown Pony\u003c\/strong\u003e is a supernatural crime story about contradictory histories, weaponized bureaucracy and the terrible power of deciding whose existence counts\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFor readers who like:\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eImpossible towns and altered histories\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eSupernatural mysteries governed by precise rules\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eGovernment agencies confronting problems reality was not designed to contain\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eDry institutional humor\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eMoral decisions with no clean answer\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eStandalone stories that combine crime, horror and the uncanny\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePart of \u003cstrong\u003eThe Pending World\u003c\/strong\u003e, where a missing hour leaves behind a second crime scene. and the Office of Consequence arrives to determine what the world has done.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eReality accepted the deed. The town followed.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Reality Services Office","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54105936036024,"sku":null,"price":9.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0978\/4459\/2824\/files\/TPW_Pony_GWP.png?v=1789326617","url":"https:\/\/realityservicesoffice.com\/products\/uptownpony","provider":"Reality Services Office","version":"1.0","type":"link"}