It's not that Frowntown is such a horrible place to live.

There are no monsters, no supervillians, no toxic waste cesspools, and no public stonings in the town square. Frowntown is pretty much just like any other changing small town: far enough away from the city that it's a treat to go there, close enough to the interstate that you can hear it hum all night long. Sometimes a semi-famous personality comes to speak at the frowntown college and the auditorium gets packed with eager faces, frowntown citizens hoping to glean a little cheap culture from someone else's experiences.

Frowntown has high schools, a university, gas stations, bars, stoplights, petty crime, and bookstores. People walk down the streets from their apartments to the hardware store. High school kids drive into the mountains to get drunk and get busted by the forest rangers. Parents of high school kids shake their heads and say "I thought we raised you better than this" and ground them for a month. Adults in Frowntown drive their cars to work, the grocery store, maybe sometimes a restaurant or a bar.

Frowntown is nearly indistinguishable from 1000 other towns in the US; the difference here is point of view. Frowntown is populated by pessimists, worriers, and busy bodies. Glasses in Frowntown are never half full, and even when they're full, they're not full enough. No one in Frowntown is ever satisfied, and no one else ever does it right. Everyone you talk to in Frowntown is just slightly unhappy - not on the verge of suicide, but always hoping for something more: and deciding it will never come.

During the winter it's always colder than last year, while the summers get hotter and more humid. Spring always brings too many flies and not enough tulips. The guy in front of you in line always gets the last of what you wanted. He probably got that because they didn't have what he wanted. Frowntown is a land of constant disappointment, a town full of silent suffering, the sort of slow, easy sadness that shows up when it rains and you forgot your umbrella.

Frowntown is certainly not immune to happiness, but a positvely charged excitement is a rare thing, and always surrounded by jealousy. New cars don't stay without scratches for long, and washing them is nearly always followed by an avian attack of the crappiest kind. We have all visited Frowntown, or at least driven through on our way somewhere else. The inhabitants of Frowntown are the constantly unhappy, the consistently negative, the unflaggingly morose. They know happiness, but rarely call her by name, and certainly don't have her address anymore.

In an effort to introduce Frowntown to prospective residents and potential investors, we have created this website. We invite you to get to know a few of Frowntown's residents and businesses listed on the left, and we will soon have a photo gallery of notable buildings and interesting places. We hope you enjoy your stay, but you probably won't.