$100-A-Week Motel

by Dan Denton, Iris Berry (Editor), Scott Aicher (Illustrator)

Dan Denton’s "$100-A-Week Motel" is a hallelujah chorus of proletariat madness, and a fine, sweet madness it is. In this modest motel, the circus comes to town, love is possible, sudden heroes wait to punch the time clock and ashtrays overflow with twice smoked twisted butts. There is a cheap bible hiding inside the table at the bedside of every room of this motel that among others, contains the outlaw gospels according to Charles Bukowski, F.A. Nettelbeck, and Fred Voss; the poetic catechism of ordinary saints. And if you press your ear to it, spirituals of the divinely real can be heard inside an earful of peeling paint. Come, let Dan Denton take you to his burning river where you can meet the practitioners of a sincere and wounded faith found only in the lobby of this $100 a Week Motel. ~ S.A. Griffin, from his foreword. Author of "Dreams Gone Mad With Hope" and editor of "Outlaw Bible of American Poetry."

170 pages, Paperback

Published January 12, 2021

About the author

Poet and DIY publisher from Toledo, Ohio

Reviews

[A.S. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dan Denton’s $100-A-Week Motel is blunt, no-bullshit prose backed by a skid-row, punk-rock gospel choir of fuck-ups and goners. This isn’t a novel, it’s a gritty collection of rust-belt psalms, bite-sized pieces of poverty, desperation, and humanity that lodge themselves in your windpipe and refuse to leave. It chokes you with compassion and second-hand smoke. $100-A-Week Motel has an honesty that only comes from experience. It’s the hangdog mope down to the bar, head still pumping with a week-long hangover. It’s a drunken saunter through the rough part of town, whistling past the graveyard and factory, chasing the sad-eyed moon.

[Adrian Lime · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dan Denton’s prose is like a big Ram 2500 pickup. It’s powerful, hard-working, American-made, it gets dirty and scratched and dinged-up in the course of its work, but once it gets going it’s damn near impossible to stop.

I didn’t know quite how to read it at first, so I just let it take me on a ride. It’s raw, straightforward, uncompromising and unapologetic. And it doesn’t just celebrate raw beauty, but illuminates the beauty of raw things, raw people. The headlights, if I’m sticking with that analogy, shine on the potholes and roadblocks as well.

$100-a-Week Motel brings to life the suffering, the celebration, the exhaustion and self-medication of a hell of a tough life, while elevating the rich complexity of a population of people who otherwise are so easily dismissed as simple, unimportant, invisible. The vignettes within are as unfiltered and brutally honest as they are thoughtful and compassionate.

[Paige Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

35 vignettes setting the scene of living out of one crusty room. Prose as sputtery as a window A/C unit, imagery molded a striking yellow-green. Befriend crank dealers and scag sluts. The days drag on like spearmint stuck to the bottom of a battered Doc Marten.

High-quality illustrations just about make up for the lack of punctuation, hyphens, et cetera in the run-ons. Everyone’s broken down, bleeding rust and limping like that Harper Lee dog. The government and general bigwigs squeeze the p!ss out of every more-straightforward louse.

Forklifts operators, happy addicts, fortune-telling carnies, scum thinking they’re better than other scum for being literate. The same story on every run-down pawn & liquor store block. I wish we had more in-scene action & dialogue, like what actually happened to the picked-on autist, the relationship with Nita before sex, or simply having extra fun reading how high he & his hippie chick got.

Things pick up more halfway through when the booze, bullets, and bad decisions increase. More factory poetry, psychedelics, and attempted payback on pedophiles. Yet things do not stay so drab; they even veer on adorable when love protrudes from the cracked cement outside malls, smoking areas, and bus stops.

[Ed Werstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Steinbeck allegedly said, “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
Dan Denton definitely does not want to contribute to that problem. Dan’s characters know they are exploited, and have long ago given up any hope of millionaire status. In $100-A-Week-Motel (Punk Hostage Press, 2021) Denton tells stories of the down and out, those who have trickled to the bottom of the economy, while any money they used to have, or could have had, has floated up to the top. Dan’s descriptions are wonderfully written in crisp, creative, real-life language, the language of the working poor. And what does the existence of a category called “working poor” tell you about late stage capitalism? Dan’s characters are in a struggle to survive, and when you get right down to it, aren’t we all? Buy this book.

Ed Werstein
Milwaukee, WI

[Ted · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dan Denton effortlessly captures the daily grind of the factory life in all its unforgiving brutality and the toll it takes merely trying to carve out some kind of a living. His prose pulls no punches, suffused as it is with the poetry of a life spent on the outer edges of society. The hotel he calls home in these pages becomes as much a main character as those lost souls which inhabit its crumbling walls. That this is his first novel is astounding as he arrives fully formed with a unique voice all his own. I can't wait to see where he goes from here. You'll be hearing more from him, that much is guaranteed. A powerful, tragic and heartbreakingly beautiful debut.

[JUSTIN WINDISH · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ex-drifters, vagrants, and vagabonds will feel nostalgia for a darker time reading Denton’s poetic tale of a man that resembles so many in America. Jobs, friendships, romantic interests, come and go offering brief specs of hope to a reader who might just see a man pull himself out of the gutter. The grit, depth, authentic emotion, and realism throughout Denton’s novella transforms the work into a pitbull, locking its jaw firmly on you commanding not to put this down. Reads well as a daily meditation or in one sitting.

[Melissa Lovewell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is wu-tang style raw human honesty at its finest. You can hear the words form off his callused hands and enter into the vapor of any real human experience. Dan Denton not only writes the unbeautiful truths of survival, but tells it in ways that speak to your bones. Heartfelt, dirty, and punk rock. It had been so long since a writer captivated me that not only did I get to experience the joy of paperback again, but my soul is craving words from this phenomenal and emotional artist.

[Sheryl Maupin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m smiling. This book was super relatable. It talked about mental health, poverty, and relationships. I’d definitely recommend this book to everyone, especially if you grew up in the Midwest. The author has a talent for using phrases and descriptions that evoke emotion in the reader. It was just wonderful!!!!

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dan Denton's prose teems with the authenticity only afforded by having lived these stories himself. Highly recommended!

[Martha · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent read! A powerful glimpse into a life I've never lived but can appreciate. From love to pain (physical and spiritual), this book stays with you.

[Brooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

i liked this a good deal. it's a bit of a waste of paper, lots of short chapters, but each one makes sense and i see why it was done that way.

a bit of dead end job poetry.