“Have you been back to Perdido Beach?”

Dekka frowned, caught off guard by a surprising feeling of guilt. “No. Why would I? It’s not exactly a place full of fond memories.”

“People have moved back to Perdido Beach,” he said. “But most of them leave within a year. The population today is a third of what it was before the anomaly. Houses are cheap, the town is mostly rebuilt, and yet the crime rate is nine times higher than it used to be. Assaults, rapes, murders. Motorcycle gangs and white supremacists and registered sex offenders, that’s who dominates Perdido Beach today.”

[...]

“We need to understand what we are dealing with,” Peaks said. “Whatever is down in that mine shaft still wields some kind of power. Decent people flee Perdido Beach. Criminals and lowlifes are drawn to it. The robots found beer bottles and cigarette butts in that cave. People have been in there, people we don’t know, people who were drawn there.”

Monster, Chapter 13