90,00 words
THE VOLCANO GOD is a 90,000-word darkly comic upmarket novel about a man who tries to vanish—and fails spectacularly.
Bill Lee suffers from a crisis of identity—to fit in, reinvention became his poison. In the middle of a divorce, he opts out completely. He vanishes. Bill runs from Maine to Hawaii and ends up living inside the crater of Diamond Head. To kill time, he collects garbage: fast food clamshells, wrappers, SPAM labels. He starts writing on the trash—litter origin stories, character descriptions, personal jokes, missives—and hides the scraps around Waikiki beach as a private art project.
People start finding them and paying attention.
A life-raft of misfits hunts him down. The world's shyest private eye. A seven-foot giant. A slippery magazine publisher hunting for his next Bukowski. A homeless matriarch who reads the stories as religious prophecy. They track him down and all end up trapped together during a violent Pacific hurricane.
One of them is murdered.
Bill has to choose: submit to the mythologies they've created about him or vanish again.
I’ve spent the past twenty-five years as an environmental culture and communications consultant helping mega-corporations craft occasionally dubious sustainability narratives. I hold a master’s degree in writing and cultural theory and now dissect the larger cultural body (corporate, pop, and religious) through fiction. THE VOLCANO GOD is my debut novel.
Contact: mail@johnrooks.com