WILMA DUNN

In Hicklin’s debut SF novel, a woman takes a strange job in a strange town.

When her beloved—if unconventional—Uncle Amos dies, Wilma Dunn learns that he had left her assets, property, and “confidences” in his will. All she has to do is travel to the mysterious town of Crate and speak to his lawyer, one Lattimer Fernico. With her best friend Dot Vander in tow, 22-year-old Wilma—on a break from college to decide what she wants to do with her life—heads to the surprisingly difficult-to-find hamlet of Crate, population 3,087. It seems Amos has left Wilma his seat on the Crate town council, an office she is expected to fill immediately. She’s also to take over Amos’ job as Crate’s official maintenance specialist. “He made sure the machinery of the town ran smoothly, responding to internal error calls and so forth,” Fernico explains vaguely. “I believe he had a sort of ticker in his house that alerted him to faults.” Armed with the new tools of her trade—including a medallionlike key that unlocks most doors—Wilma begins to explore Crate and its eccentricities: a library filled with board games, 3D-printed funnel cakes. Then come the stranger discoveries, like the missing store mannequins, the fact that Amos died coughing puffs of green smoke, and the mysterious underground tunnels that run beneath the entire town. Wilma is eager to complete the work that Amos began, though it seems as though others may go to lethal lengths to stop her. Hicklin’s plot is a clockwork puzzle with many spinning gears, some of them literal. When Wilma discovered that a jogger fell through a hole in the street, she “expected to see a sinkhole or a breached storm drain. Instead, she saw a deep shaft filled with protruding wheels and oscillating pistons, stretching down farther than she could see.” Told in an offbeat, slightly heightened style, this labyrinthian novel has many wonderful secrets to offer for those willing to plumb the depths of Crate.

A delightful, intricate maze of a novel.