IN THE NEXT MOMENT EVERYTHING WILL CHANGE

A fugitive writer takes up with a hippie time traveler looking for his lost love in Caulfield’s comic novel.

David Wilson’s writing career started as potential personified, his celebrated short story “The First Chapter” creating immense buzz for the brilliant novel sure to follow. When he meets Abbott, a Tom Selleck look-alike with a quasi-religious aura driving a kit-car Ferrari 308, it’s 20 years later and David is hitchhiking, alone. His advance money is gone, his wife has left him, he’s on the run from the law after embezzling university funds, and he has yet to make it past the first sentence of the second chapter of his long-awaited follow-up (“I set up my word processor in a corner to write, and nothing came. Years passed”). In Abbott, David sees an opportunity to salvage his novel; the man tells fantastical stories about looking for his missing wife, Lucille, whom he both met and lost as he traveled through time at the Woodstock music festival while traversing a universal fungal web after getting caught in the rain with five sheets of brown acid in his pocket. Abbott’s stories begin to shift to the exploits of his best friend, Denton White, who spends his time in a psych ward studying the teachings of David Carradine’s character in Kung Fu. Caulfield wears his influences on his sleeve—the novel opens like a restrained Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas before segueing into a less repressive One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest–like setting while dropping references to television, including Magnum, P.I., The Incredible Hulk, and, of course, Kwai Chang Caine, throughout. These nods, along with mentions of conspiracies involving the MKUltra program and the death of Bruce Lee, lend the story a larger-than-life atmosphere. The author shows a great deal of humor in his outlandish characters but never undercuts them with his jokes. The book is upfront from the outset about its unreliable narrators, even when it plays fast and loose with who is telling the story; as strange as its premise is, the novel offers surprising insights into loss and unfulfilled expectations.

Unapologetically out there.