Coyne, Connor. Hungry Rats. Chicago: Gothic Funk Press, 2010. $16.

“You don’t become a ghost when you die,” explains the murky, unseen narrator of Hungry Rats. “You make a ghost whenever you leave.”

So surely the Flint, Michigan, that 15-year-old Meredith Malady inhabits must be full of ghosts. Indeed, if it was the stark landscape of Maine that gave us the chilling tales of Stephen King, then Flint, Michigan — which has lost so much population since the golden age of General Motors — could very well become this generation’s Maine.

Written in second person, Hungry Rats is a murder mystery that imparts not only the eerie feeling that the reader is being watched — or is on trial for a crime she may or may not have committed — but also suggests that she is trapped in an increasingly macabre Choose Your Own Adventure. Hightail it out of Flint on the first Greyhound bus, turn to page 43. Fall through the trapdoor and come face to face with the Rat Man, the end. It’s the choice that Meredith must make as the victims of the mysterious serial killer known only as the Rat Man continue to grow in number.

Though the whodunnit aspect of Hungry Rats is fairly straightforward — possibly a bit thin — it pales in significance as the reader grows more slack-jawed at the sheer magnitude of horror lying just beneath the surface of this ordinary (if crumbling) city, this ordinary (if dysfunctional) family. It’s a horror that transcends the lifetime of mortal man, tunneling beneath the decay of history toward an era when central Michigan was the domain of loggers and lumberjacks, saloon-keepers and prostitutes. It’s the horror that suggests a place has memories, and that the sins of the fathers (and mothers) will be revisited upon later generations. And the story’s ambiguous ending suggests that there’s no easy way to break that cycle.

The one thing notably missing from Hungry Rats is an afterword discussing Coyne’s extensive historical research. The notorious 19th century criminals Jim Carr and Maggie Duncan are transformed into characters of such mythological scope in Part II of the book that it’s a shame to leave the reader doubting their authenticity.

But all in all, Hungry Rats forges a new and exciting path into the realms of urban supernatural fiction, belonging on the same bookshelf as Fritz Leiber’s classic “Smoke Ghost” and Christopher Barzak’s lonesome One for Sorrow. Read more at www.hungry-rats.com.