In 1880, a white mob attacked Chinese people, their homes and their businesses, virtually destroying all of Chinatown. Anti-Chinese sentiment escalated to mob rule in Chinese enclaves throughout the Western United States. In Denver, most of the Chinese operated laundries, picking up a need for Denver's residents. Men who had worked on the construction of the first transcontinental railroad or had been miners in California crossed over the Rocky Mountains after their work was completed or mines were depleted in California. More Chinese immigrants arrived in the town the following year. The first Chinese resident of Denver, Hong Lee, arrived in 1869 and lived in a shanty at Wazee and F Streets and ran a washing and ironing laundry business. CriMemoir: Dennis McMillan on the True Story Behin.Chinatown in Denver, Colorado, was a residential and business district of Chinese Americans in what is now the LoDo section of the city.Sandra Ruttan on Nocturne le jeudi by Scott Phillips.Pete Dragovich on The Adjustment by Scott Phillips.Sean Doolittle on Rut by Scott Phillips.Steve Weddle on Cottonwood by Scott Phillips.William Boyle on Rake by Scott Phillips.Your Food Sucks: Kieran Shea on Scott Phillips.

The Hairy Canopy: Thomas Wickersham on Hop Alley a.

I want to be able to take her to the movies again.

I want to read those books sitting by that river whose beauty makes Mole cry “ Oh my!” I want my girlfriend to keep rolling slightly toward me in the mornings. I want Scott Phillips to keep writing his wonderfully odd books. When I finished the passage she turned to me and said, “ Until you said ‘Mole’ I thought you were reading from Hop Alley.” There is a description of a river, the river, with its “ silvery shoulder and foamy tumble of a weir” that makes joining Rat and Mole on their picnic sound like paradise. This morning my girlfriend was half-asleep as I started reading to her from The Wind in the Willows. “ …rolling slightly toward me to afford a better view of her lovely sex, its labia dark and glistening, a microscopically thin strand of semen suspended delicately across the hair canopy just above it.” She was enraptured by the storytelling long before I had the chance to scandalize her with the post-coital passage I was searching for, I failed to find them on my initial scan, so I started reading the book to her from the beginning. I told my girlfriend that the dirty parts of Hop Alley were particularly raunchy. Scott Phillips is a masterful perversion of Americana.

His books are exceptionally readable, yet difficult to classify They are books that are as reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio as they are of Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me. His protagonists do dreadful deeds yet somehow never cross the line into cartoon villainy. Scott Phillips’s books shouldn’t be read for their plots, but for the sensibilities of their author. But none of these attractions are why one should read the book.

There is plenty of action to be found in Hop Alley including fornication, multiple homicides, a riot, and a jailbreak. Hop Alley is not a sequel, nor a prequel, but a segment of Bill Ogden’s life, bookended on either side by Cottonwood, the novel in which Phillips introduced the character 10 years prior. Nominally a Western, it tells the story of Bill Ogden, a fellow of great education and lesser morals who operates a photography studio in 1870s Denver, Colorado. Like all of Scott Phillips’s books, Hop Alley is odd.

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