An insomniac's lullaby for listeners steeped in American mythologies like Wisconsin Death Trip, Winesburg, Ohio, Odds Bodkin's Tall Tales, and Barry Hannah's Boomerang, the mystery of Henrytown came crackling through Salt Lake City twenty years ago as a spoken history-a series of "tall tales" local host Chris Erickson would recite between folk songs on his late-night radio program. This is a compendium of those lost recordings.

Back in the high days of beekeeping, it was customary for keepers to tell their bees about important household events (or household secrets). Births and deaths; marriages and divorces; arrivals and departures. A woman in Carolina might knock on the hive and whisper, "Lucy is dead." If that "telling" didn't take place and the bees weren't "put in mourning," people suspected, they might withhold honey, or leave the hive, or even die.

Sung out by a town crier as mysteriously attuned to weather patterns and local myths as he is to the pandemonium of American speech, Chris Erickson's debut work is a revival of that tradition-a promiscuous, hive-minded folklore which speaks in many voices at once, and knows that every town is its own living, breathing entity.