90,00 words
Zero-charisma, semi-divorced Bill Lee runs away from Maine to Hawai’i looking for a place to hide his own body. Becoming the literal and literary figurehead of a cult was not part of the plan.
On Oʻahu, Bill carves out a free-range campsite inside Diamond Head – a vagrant writer’s retreat. He hikes the dead volcano every day, and he writes—scribbling stories and characters onto the discarded trash of humanity – bubble gum wrappers, fast food clam shells, SPAM labels. Bill hides this “litter-ature” around Waikīkī beach like some homeless prose-planting Johnny Appleseed. His recycling art project spirals as strangers find the baby apples and begin treating him as a prophet and he captures the unwanted attention of a slippery literary magazine publisher. Stalked by a giant from New Jersey and a painfully shy private investigator, Bill’s meditative life crumbles in the light.
The novel opens aboard a commercial flight to Hawaiʻi during a catastrophic midair failure, moving through the cabin to expose how fear, class, denial, and self-interest surface under crisis. The narrative centers on Bill Lee, a quietly erased man whose detached interior reflections—on marriage, insignificance, and cultural “hyperobjects” like mountains, plastic, and capitalism—intercut with the unfolding disaster. The opening establishes a novel concerned less with survival than with how meaning collapses, performs, and persists amid systems too large to escape. These pages are included below as requested.
The story culminates in murder during a literal and moral Pacific island hurricane, forcing Bill to choose whether to vanish once again or be published and face exposure.
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