Replacement Parts

In Dexton, Iowa, every man, woman, and child grapples with the challenges of small-town life, each seeking redemption-or escape-from a land to which they're deeply rooted.

The local sheriff searches for a missing girl while trying to reconcile with his estranged daughter. A returning soldier, haunted by violent visions, finds his hometown no longer feels like home. When a girl loses her mother, she forges an unlikely family with a mysterious drifter and a man

claiming to be her father. Within a center for troubled teens, intersecting narrators get caught in purgatory between the past and future. And in the title story, a child befriends a sick classmate, forcing the boy to pick sides in a school that shuns weakness.

In Replacement Parts, a debut collection by Marc Dickinson, we witness a recurring cast of characters as they navigate their way from adolescence to adulthood. Intimate in nature but novelistic in scope, these twelve linked stories span the generations, each replacing the next until everyone is finally forced to face their own dark history.