Griswold chronicles all of this with care, as the Haneys and their neighbors, the Voyles family, endure mysterious ailments as well as the brutal demise of their farm animals to sudden seizures and horrific bleeding. But the graphic parts of this book are in some ways the least of it. Even more crushing are the humiliations of litigation, as Stacey and her neighbors try to get help from Pennsylvania’s financially decimated Department of Environmental Protection. The D.E.P. gives them such a runaround that they have to petition the courts to force the state agency to do its job.

Range doesn’t look good in Griswold’s account, but at least the avarice of a corporation bent on profit maximization isn’t all that surprising; what’s more astonishing is the failure of the state government to regulate the company properly, and to protect the people under its watch. Here, Griswold’s multiple years of reporting convey the slow crawl of accumulating frustrations that eroded trust in government bit by bit. All the while, victims like the Haneys fret over the hassle and cost of obtaining clean water, as Range hands out mini water bottles at the county fair.

The community itself provides little by way of support or solace, as the widening gap between the haves and have-nots means that the winners have all the more to lose. Unsympathetic townspeople doubt Stacey’s claims of chemical exposure and blame Harley’s illness on his mother’s divorce.

Griswold delineates the hardened resentments forged in Stacey’s county, which voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump in 2016. “Resource extraction has long fed a sense of marginalization and disgust,” Griswold writes, “both with companies that undermine the land and with the urbanites who flick on lights without considering the miners who risk their lives to power them.” Fracking only deepened these fissures and introduced some more. Where coal-miner and steelworker unions used to provide some sense of solidarity, the ascendancy of mineral rights — privately owned and unequally distributed — have pitted neighbors against one another.

And it’s here that the social effects of fracking start to look truly pernicious, as the environmental fallout and the influx of money splinter a community, thereby dismantling its willingness and ability to act in a way that transcends the cynicism of individual interests. Stacey just wants others to see what she sees, and to feel seen herself. More than punishment, she hopes for a day when those she holds responsible for her plight will get a lesson in empathy, even if it has to come the hard way. “If I had my choice, I wouldn’t send them to jail,” she says. “I’d send them to my house to live.”