by Karima Vargas Bushnell (Author)
Halycon Sage is back! As the eccentric citizens of Dry Creek Gulch happily organize a peaceful, post-technological society, big sparkly blue Squidren are rapidly approaching Earth! These telepathic, time-traveling, dimension-hopping Squids have plans for us-as do the suddenly sentient Nanobots and a Shadowy Man who preys on human weakness: shifting dimensions, eccentric aliens, and batty earthlings. Love, hope, courage, and acceptance-but there is danger!
The Book of Squidly Light is a space western and a post-apocalyptic story: Science Fiction, Literary Fiction, and Metafiction. It's also Book Two of The Sage Chronicles following The Way Beyond: The Life and Times of Halycon Sage, which introduces the world-famous yet compulsively anonymous founder of the Post-Modernist Minimalist Neo-Symbolist Pseudo-Realist School of Literature.
In Book Two, we return to the desert town of Dry Creek Gulch and re-encounter old friends: confused genius Alexander Preisczech and his mysterious wife Jenny, former gangsters Ratbone and Wolf, Iraqi pilot Muhammad Abdurraheem Hussein and family, the intrepid Ruby Echevaria and many more, including Sage's TV-watching, motel-sleeping horse No-Name Stupid. We meet a few enemies of all sentient beings as well. The goal-again, and always-is to unite across cultural and intergalactic barriers to save the earth and the wider universe from the dangers that threaten them, even after the first supposed End of the World.
The Book of Squidly Light takes everything deeper. It's written in layers and levels, and like the metaphysical system of the Squidren, it contains various threads: life in a post-apocalyptic desert town, multicultural people and cross-cultural or cross-species romances, the thoughts and behaviors of space aliens, suddenly sentient nanobots, rituals both holy and unholy, poetry written by cats and horses, and even a few Secrets of the Universe. It's also a critique of some life-denying attitudes that threaten us all.