Coyote Redux

The further frenetic mythopoetic adventures of the Paleolithic Trickster Coyote in post-modern civilization as he steals a car, invents television, hunts a mouse, runs for office, and meets interesting new people like-you know, important people, actors and politicians and such-Death, Forest Trump, Baglady, Bombay Chevrolet, Sam McHooter, Legba, and the New Young Gods. Coyote learns to cope with supermarkets and amusement parks as he tries to establish his godhood in the mass confusion of the entertainment world. He is killed by accident and intent by the military, frightened animals and natural dangers, although his ally Fox has the power to resurrect him to continue his responsibility to protect humans from monsters and vice versa. Coyote's proficiency with masks allows him to pretend to be actors, generals, women, and other animals, for the purposes of getting food, sex, money, and power. It does not always work out the way he intends. Review by Susan Cardinal Sleepwell This is a novel of terror and laughter, of bondage and explosion-a searing masterpiece of tortured pieces, sewn in the skein of a sow's purse, as the authors pursue fame with shocking intensity. Coyote is changed from a complex morally ambiguous ?gure into a cardboard commentator for the animal news channel. The text pulsates with nervous energy and undigested gas. It is a searing satire cooked on the ?ames of passionate purple prose, disposed of in a desert setting of unparalleled natural pulchritude. Most of all, it is an absurdist classic, reveling in the stupidity of humans in dealing with the nobility of animals, the meaninglessness of war and consumption, and the importance of breathing and excreting. We follow Coyote on his journey in search of free sex and food. The trip is not con?ned within the conventions of a linear or coherent narrative. Coyote bounces all over recollections and information, inner feeling and outer action. This not only challenges our expectations of literary form, but it irritates the shit out of us. Coyote's credo of greed and aggrandizement is fueled by testosterone, but fooled by estrogen. That is Coyote's lament-he is too late to de?ower the intact virgin of bankrupt global capitalism and too early to grope the youth of utopia. The narrative style re?ects the confusion of his remembering over many lifetimes, then of delving into the plasma regions of repressed feelings and animal lust. The long sentences act like interminable bridges between unpleasant ideas and poorly formed thoughtscapes of half-hearted insights into the human and nonhuman conditions, which get soaked by plasma. This is a novel where gods walk among people, sleep with them, ruin them ?nancially, then go on and laugh and play. The settings in the deserts of North America and New York re?ect the shadowy haunts of the gods trapped in their own deserts of unbelief and minimal clean water. The old gods may be forgotten by name, but they still struggle to snuggle and be warm under the blanket of belief that has been tattered by the oil-soaked machinery of modern materialism. New gods, with the same bad habits, start to form out of a developing post-industrial unconsciousness.