About Lou Skrivara

Lou Skrivara writes about the kind of city that never makes the postcards.

His Moldeth City novels take place in a dying Rust Belt port — a town of smokestacks and church steeples, of sodium streetlights and wet asphalt, where three crime families divide up what's left after a federal sweep tore the old order out by the roots. The bosses who ran the place for forty years are gone. The soldiers, the fixers, the captains who stayed behind are still working the wreckage. There are no rules anymore. There are only debts.

He grew up on gravy Sundays and fish-fry Fridays, in the kind of neighborhood where the houses get paid off in cash, the money goes in a coffee can, and nobody's set foot in a bank since 1986. He learned to write the way the men talked at his kitchen table — short, sideways, cigarette-slow, never quite answering the question you asked. He learned that the loudest thing in a room is usually the guy who isn't talking.

The books run lean. The violence is brief, and mostly you see the cleanup. The women have their own agendas and don't wait in doorways. The city rots quietly, from the mayor's office down to the parish council, and everybody in it is inside a system they can't leave. That's the whole engine of the thing. Nobody in Moldeth City gets to walk away clean.

Skrivara lives in Oklahoma with his wife and their dog, a long way from the lake water and the smokestacks. Which is probably why he keeps going back.