The novel’s setting of Vacca Vale, Indiana, was a manufacturing hub owing to the Zorn automobile factory, which employed many of the town’s inhabitants and affected the city’s layout. By the time the narrative begins, however, Zorn has been obsolete for decades, and the town is ranked first on Newsweek magazine’s list of “Top Ten Dying American Cities” (41). This is accompanied by an 11.7% unemployment rate and other dystopian attributes such as “the rat population surpassing the human population by an estimated 30,000” (40).

Although Vacca Vale is fictitious, it is loosely based on Gunty’s hometown of South Bend, Indiana, a postindustrial town that was dominated by the Studebaker car factory until it closed in the 1960s. Gunty, who was born in the 1990s, says that she still grew up feeling “haunted by this industry that I had no connection to”; she adds that the ghost of heavy industry still “determines so much about the structure of the city, even the urban design itself but also the culture of the city […] that guided a lot of their major decisions in life, including their voting patterns (Biles, Adam. “On Transcendence, Parental Failure & writing Indiana, with Tess Gunty.