Ivan Cox's 'Blood Pudding' Paints a Haunting Portrait of Gritty Immigrant Life 100 Years Ago

In his riveting new novel "Blood Pudding", Fulton Books author/physician Ivan Cox serves up a stunning and painfully intimate portrayal of 1920s immigrant life in Rehoboth, Pennsylvania, a smokey, hardscrabble coal mining and zinc smelting town on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. 

With his parents and six siblings, Tad Malinowski lives in a tiny row house owned by the coal and zinc company, where Jumbo, his muscular Polish immigrant father, a charismatic but abusive alcoholic, toils as a miner and later as a sulfuric acid vat attendant. To pay off the onerous family debt, Jumbo secretly distills vodka under the company house and sells it to his fellow miners and smelters. He convinces his wife Eva and their children to assist with the illicit vodka enterprise and to keep mum about it. 

When Tad is nine, Eva becomes pregnant yet again and attempts to self-abort with a method she learned in Poland. She botches it badly and hemorrhages. As young Tad watches her die, he braces for the dreadful changes the family will face without her. Immediately Vera, Tad's oldest sister, quits high school and takes over her mother's domestic duties. In a few months, Jumbo forces Vera to join him in his bedroom at night, and he threatens the entire family to remain silent about it.  

Under a pall of shame and fear, the children search for ways to escape Jumbo's chaotic and paralyzing tyranny. As first-person narrator, Tad describes these violent, often self-destructive, confrontations. His vivid and unflinching visions of these fierce family encounters are steady, loving, comically innocent, and powerfully dramatic. Despite the grim odds, Tad finally escapes and finds a brighter future for himself.    

Ivan Cox grew up and was educated in the Pittsburgh area. He has drawn on many recollections of family members and friends to flesh out this human drama with sharp and detailed realism. He has filled this "Blood Pudding" lyrically and authentically with the struggles of recently immigrated workers in Pittsburgh, then America's major ethnic melting pot and industrial powerhouse.   

Published by Fulton Books, Ivan Cox's "Blood Pudding" offers an intimate snapshot of America's ever-journeying soul, the soul we all benefit from celebrating. This marvelously conceived fictional portrait says much about where we came from and reminds us how difficult, but noble, our quest as Americans continues to be.   

Readers who wish to experience this captivating description of America's saga can purchase "Blood Pudding" at bookstores everywhere, or online at the Apple iTunes Store, Amazon, Google Play or Barnes & Noble. 

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