Supplied
- Title: Lower City
- Author: Alex Spring
- Genre: Fiction
- Publisher: Random House Canada
- Pages: 400
The title of Alex Spring’s debut novel refers to a working-class area of Hamilton, a city colloquially referred to as Steeltown. Lower City, we are told, is distinct from Upper City, “an often beautiful, frequently leafy part of town raised a hundred metres up on the Niagara Escarpment.”
Here one can find the wealthy and entitled one per cent, while the “normal people,” along with “Toronto transplants and hipsters,” occupy the valley beneath, a “slice of land between the mountain and the lake” where “factories and steel plants” proliferate. This geographical separation provides Spring – the pseudonym for former Globe arts editor Jared Bland – a ready-made metaphor for the class conflict that permeates the thematic underpinnings of his book.
Nominally a crime novel, Lower City’s plot hinges on a plan by a group of masked Gen Z vigilantes – known as the Three Pigs because of the porcine masks they wear to conceal their true identities – to kidnap a quartet of influential people with the intent to strike fear into the populace and thereby force a social realignment benefiting the city’s poor and disenfranchised.
Or, at least, that’s the justification for the crime spree. One of the participants, who goes by the moniker Cowboy, is a sociopath with more murderous ideas, while a new addition to the group, an older man who adopts the nom de guerre Mr. Frosty, begins to throw the younger members curves by altering their plans at the last minute.
Spring’s protagonist is Danny Clarke, a 26-year-old transplant from B.C. who does shift work at the fictional Braden Steel plant in Hamilton. (Their slogan: “Strong as steel, strong as family.”) Danny lives with his aunt and uncle, Rupinder and Myles, and their children, Kabir and Priya.
He’s also grieving the death of his relationship with Sam, the proprietor of a local bar, and not so subtly yearning for a reconciliation. On his break during an overnight shift at the plant, Danny witnesses the first of the kidnappings, putting him in the crosshairs of two local cops and eventually goading him to begin playing amateur sleuth himself.
Jared Bland, also known by his pen name, Alex Spring.Jaime Hogge/Supplied
Unfolding during the final week in October, 2025, Spring’s novel attempts to do for Hamilton what Sam Wiebe’s Dave Wakeland novels do for Vancouver by locating a thriller in a highly specific version of a recognizable urban Canadian centre. In this, he is largely successful, depicting a city that enforces a rigorous separation between the haves and have-nots and employing vivid language to portray the grit and resilience required to navigate its more hardened edges.
Spring also takes pains to demonstrate conversance with the language and habits of Gen Z, name checking musicians Doja Cat and Clipse, visually referencing the Shiba Inu Dogecoin mascot, and including conversations that take the form of text exchanges and online streaming discourse (emojis included).
The younger generation’s lexicon operates alongside a healthy dose of nostalgia, most particularly regarding video game streamer Priya’s choice of name for her AI assistant – Nancy, after literary teen detective Nancy Drew. The novel’s timeframe unfolds during the 2025 World Series between the Toronto Blue Jays and the Los Angeles Dodgers, which allows the author to relive the contest in perhaps a bit more detail than is warranted.
As a protagonist, Danny is a combination of gimlet-eyed naivete and embodied white male ignorance, which can become grating as he embarks on a journey from irresponsible romantic to engaged amateur sleuth. And it involves the author taking great pains to underscore the moral message of his story, often at the expense of its forward momentum.
It’s not enough for Danny to witness the xenophobic toxicity of a bloviating far-right podcaster – he must also be schooled in the ills of racism and the politics of grievance by his woke half-Indian cousin. “I guess this is what they mean by privilege,” Danny thinks to himself, just in case any readers happened to miss the point.
What is ultimately most frustrating about Lower City is that it gets the calculus backward. Instead of using thriller conventions to advance social commentary in a narrative context, Spring foregrounds the moral to such an extent that the story itself often goes missing.
Danny’s recent experience in therapy often washes over him to such an extent that he begins to disappear into therapeutic language: “When you feel overwhelmed, or had a lot going on, you had to pause and sit with what you were feeling. And then you had to look at it, see what it was made of.” Long expository passages direct the reader how to feel or respond at any given moment. Even the novel’s climax features Danny lecturing one of the young kidnappers in the soft-left politics of wokeness, practically erasing any tension that had otherwise been built up.
Urban noir of the kind practised by Wiebe or his progenitors – writers such as Elmore Leonard, Jim Thompson, and Raymond Chandler – have the unique ability to elevate themes of working-class oppression and social isolation without calling undue attention to them; we intuit the violence and illegality as the inevitable products of an unequal system that benefits the well off while exploiting the workers and less fortunate. But this edifice falls apart if the poles are reversed.