Ex-Members

There are ruined things in the town of New Dutchess, New Jersey. A hotel that was never finished; a train line that never came. This is the town that Åsa Morgan thought she’d leave behind; this is the town Virgil Carey couldn’t leave. It’s the town where Dean Polis first started writing songs, and the town where something awful fell from a building one day. It’s where the band Alphanumeric Murders got their start, and where a series of tape recordings reveal the troubled history of the band and the lives of its members. 

Ex-Members is a novel about punk scenes, old secrets, and hometowns that stalk us and break our hearts despite our best efforts to escape.

“During a moment in which Americans are besieged by an onslaught of political messaging from the sublime to the ridiculous, this slim, thoughtful volume helps make sense of what we’re seeing.”
—Sascha Cohen, NPR (on Political Sign)

Carroll’s debut novel is ostensibly (well, and actually) about the journey two people go on after meeting at a punk show in Seattle, but it’s also a provocative meditation on the larger trip that they—and all of us—are on; namely, finding out who we really are, the fragility of the lives we’ve constructed around us, and what it is we’re doing in the little time we have.”—Kristen Iversen, Nylon (on Reel)

“...art is the dark star around which its satellites of broken artists orbit. The men and women who make the weird films and stark soundtracks that populate Transitory are permitted some degree of detachment. Not so their audience of obsessives.”
—Jim Ruland, San Diego City Beat (on Transitory)