Summertime in Murdertown How I Survived Where the Best Die

Born and raised in Flint, Michigan, David Gunn is proud to have grown up in a city facing constant adversity, and to represent a community whose government knowingly poisoned its citizens for years. Now, he pulls back the curtain on Flint—like only those born and raised there can do. His advice is poignant and timely, and urges readers to never stop working through the struggle. To not create a back-up plan, and to cross the bridge and burn it behind them. To define the things they want and run toward them.Like Laura Jane Grace's Tranny and Rob Rufus' Die Young With Me, Summertime in Murdertown is part memoir, part ethnography. It sheds light on what it means to grow up amid constant violence and poverty and serves as a voice to those struggling to survive as we navigate this unpredictable and often cruel world in search of inspiration.

David Gunn was born and raised in Flint, Michigan—the forgotten city, and one of the most violent in America. Wise beyond his years, his is the voice of a man who has experienced the unimaginable and triumphed over it. After a childhood that saw him brandishing guns at rival gangs, losing his virginity on the roof of his school, and breaking into neighboring homes—all by the age of ten—he learned to survive by allying himself with a revolving cast of neighborhood kids he came to think of as brothers. A nomadic childhood spent moving from house to house after utilities were cut off culminated in expulsion from school, at which point he began to pass his days in the public library, studying philosophy, psychology, business books, and texts on martial arts. As a teenager, taking shelter in an underground club, he turned to music. He and his bandmates stole whatever equipment they could get their hands on and taught themselves to play all night, every night, channeling their energies into songs that betrayed a city and a country unable to contend with its invisible class. Both as an individual and as the frontman of the band KING 810, he has never shied away from uncomfortable truths. From being arrested at the airport while on their way to the UK to play Download Festival to cancelling a sold-out headline show at Detroit's St. Andrew's Hall because they were not permitted to carry their weapons into the venue, it's been a colorful ride to say the least.With KING, he has toured the globe in support of three full-length major label releases, at times playing to upwards of 20,000 people. His music and videos have amassed millions of streams while building a cult-like following of diehard fans.A natural storyteller, starkly poetic, painting the most vivid of pictures, his words are hauntingly unforgettable because they ring true; in his music, in his art, and most of all, in his memoir. No stranger to controversy, David Gunn's voice is more vital than ever.