"A Town is Drowning" is a 1955 novel by Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth, detailing the effects of a hurricane on a small town in Pennsylvania. Despite Pohl and Kornbluth's fame as science-fiction writers, this book is "contemporary fiction", meaning it is realistic and set in the (then) contemporary world of the 1950s, although it does have some elements of being an adventure story. The book is relatively short, at 153 pages, and follows a half-dozen characters over the course of a little more than 48 hours.
The book begins with our "main" protagonist, Mickey Groff, on a business trip, getting stuck in the rain. What starts as an annoyance begins to escalate as the rain turns into a wall of water that destroys the town and drives Groff, a local shopkeeper, a stranded college kid, the owner of a resort, and several others, into a trek for survival. After the initial flood has passed and the National Guard has arrived, the townspeople take stock of their future. There is an additional small subplot where an unscrupulous businessman plans to buy up the town's assets, and that leads to the book's final statement on human nature.
The book had some interesting points to me, one of the most obvious being that it was written at a time when weather radar was not yet an active technology, and that telephone and radio were also less developed, leading to a surprise storm being able to wipe out a town without warning. There were other small details: apparently, cheese and cracker packets and the term "meet cute" existed in the 1950s, but bottled water did not. (Everyone is stuck drinking soda pop after the town's water goes out). The gender roles and stock characters are also a bit antiquated for a modern reader, especially since the book doesn't have a lot of deep characterization. The ending moral, that disaster brings out the best, and worst, in people, is obvious but still important.
But! The most important question, and the question I was asking, and the question you might be asking is---why did two science-fiction writers, who are known for sprawling epics and sharp conceptual stories, write a story about a flood in Pennsylvania? And did they succeed? The answer to the first question is---I don't know. Maybe editors requested it, maybe they wanted something more commercial, maybe they just wanted to try it out. The second question is---did two speculative fiction authors succeed in writing something worthwhile without a central concept or idea to it? I would say that they did, in that the book is easy to read, describes the action well, and has some relatable characters. But it also doesn't really have a "wow factor", like I felt it was adequately interesting, but didn't have anything that really grabbed my attention, which is a big difference from Pohl and Kornbluth's masterworks in science-fiction. This is basically interesting airport fiction (before that existed) but is mostly of interest now to historians of science-fiction.