Urbantasm, Book One: The Dying City

“[Urbantasm, Book One: The Dying City] features a well-constructed plot with a bit of mystery, drama, death, and teen romance. The author manages to keep all of the balls in the air and consider all of the problems that come with a city on the decline and trying to grow up there… the images created by the words will stick with the reader… The trials of being thirteen are truly captured. These characters are growing up fast and not perfect by any means.”

— The BookLife Prize

“As tragic as the falling apart of the city was and is, these kids had a lot of nerve, spirit, and guts, probably because they didn’t know any better… so much depth and courage.”

— Writers’ Digest Self-Published Book Awards

“[Urbantasm, Book One: The Dying City is] a book that values risk. Coyne managed to make gritty urbanscapes and the conflict therein technicolor.”

— S.C. Megale, author of This Is Not a Love Scene

“Urbantasm: The Dying City is a novel of wonder and horror — but I don’t mean that in any traditional sense. Though preternatural elements impinge on the story here and there, what really fuels both the wonder and the horror is Connor Coyne’s uncanny portrayal of early teenhood, when every dimly understood new vista promised ecstasy untold, and every wrong move or unintentional difference could mean social death — or worse. This is a tough, tender, and unsettling rumination on coming of age in a dying industrial city, and I’m both eager and terrified to see what happens next.”

— William Shunn, author of The Accidental Terrorist

“The first volume of Connor Coyne’s epic novel Urbantasm imbues a neglected part of America with an azure luminescence. Portrayed with sensitive and romantic candor, this tale’s young protagonists are never despairing but perpetually haunted. Coyne understands that to survive is to be wounded, and Urbantasm illuminates the shadows of a nation that has always exploited the defenseless and the forgotten.”

— Jeffery Renard Allen, author of Song of the Shank

“The fate of Flint, Michigan can often be hard to believe. Yet Connor Coyne skillfully captures the tarnished essence of a thinly veiled Vehicle City — known as Akawe in Urbantasm — with a compelling blend of noire and Rust Belt magical realism.”

— Gordon Young, author of

Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City

“Combining an ongoing love of noir atmospherics with memorable character development, Connor Coyne’s Urbantasm takes readers into a vivid and utterly authentic world of adolescent angst, yearning, fear and love.”

— Jan Worth-Nelson, author of Night Blind

“[Urbantasm] is much more than a teen novel. It is a massive creation from Coyne’s omnivorous mind, and an often gripping evocation of the throes of a struggling city.”

— Robert R. Thomas, East Village Magazine

“[Urbantasm, Book Three: The Darkest Road] is about being fifteen, where nothing matters and everything matters too much.”

— M.L. Kennedy, Author of Things You Leave Behind

“The realest portrayal of angry young people I’ve ever read.”

— Amanda Steinhoff, Author of Lily and the Golden Lute

“Connor is a great writer. His ability to create amazing characters in a richly painted fictional background is something to be truly admired… This is a coming of age tale, crime story, thriller, suspense novel and a use of fiction to condemn and glorify urban decay and corruption… From a pure storytelling perspective, this is a fantastic read. Realistic characters in real peril and dealing with real-life situations… Then a bizarre pair of sunglasses is found and things get — weird. It’s breathtaking writing. I feel Urbantasm is destined to be a classic.”

— Bryan Alaspa, Author of S.P.I.D.A.R.

“Urbantasm: The Dying City recognizes that adolescence is magic – your understanding transforms, you are consumed by desires of and just beyond your body, you know your friends in a way you didn’t before. Coyne combines this magic with the sociology and cartography of Akawe, Michigan – a ‘dying,’ but by no means dead, incarnation of 1990s Flint – and a pair of strange blue sunglasses to pull seventh-grader John Bridge and his friends towards something raw, complex, and new.”

— Gemma Cooper-Novack, Author of

We Might As Well Be Underwater

“Incandescent prose illuminates the darkest underground passages of a town ruined by an auto company, where gangstah drugs turn everything dreamy, mysterious, and deadly. And you can’t look away, sentence by gorgeous sentence, from the drama caught writhing and screaming, squinting its eyes against the light.”

— Tantra Bensko, Author of Glossolalia: Psychological Suspense