The Last Pin Boy of Miller's Lanes
A Novel

About this book:

In the summer of 1985, the last manual pinsetter in Oakhaven, Pennsylvania, is a fifteen-year-old boy named Sean Devlin. At Miller's Lanes—eight wood alleys, forty years of tung oil, and a neon sign flickering half-dead above the door—the air is thick enough to chew: machine oil, cigarette smoke, spilled draft, and the white chalk dust that settles in your pores. Out in the suburbs, sleek automatic pinsetters are replacing boys like Sean. In Oakhaven, where the Iron Works is cutting three hundred jobs and the union vote has already gone sideways, the only thing moving faster than the rust is the past catching up.

Sean spends his shifts in the pit, fifteen seconds to clear wood, reset the deck, and send the ball home before the next bowler steps up. His shins are a map of bruises. His father drinks Stroh's in the Trophy Room, peeling labels off bottles, haunted by a plant that's selling its soul to Alabama non-union shops. And on Lane Seven—where a man once died mid-approach and the wood warps every time the river rises—an old pattern-maker named Stush Krolik rolls a rubber ball with no thumb hole, reading the grain like scripture. He knows something the owner doesn't: the lanes are alive. They breathe. And they're dying.

*The Last Pin Boy of Miller's Lanes* is a love letter to the smell of hot friction oil and the sound of a perfect strike; to the men who threw heavy rubber at hard maple to keep from kicking their own doors down; to the moment the automation arrives, the mill goes cold, and the neon finally sputters out. Rich with the grit of *The Deer Hunter* and the quiet heartbreak of *Empire Falls*, this is a novel about what we lose when the machines take over—and what a boy carries forward when the last pin falls.