Okay guys, this book was a bit of a doozy. When I was asked to review it and read the synopsis I was pretty excited, and then I saw it was 600 pages. Still, I felt confident I could breeze through it. I did not breeze through it, but not because it was bad, it was just very dense and thought provoking.
EASTER SUNDAY, 1973: Just before dawn in Kingsburg, California, six-year-old Gordon Swannson, asthmatic boy genius, gets his ass kicked by a spectral Easter Bunny—an event that sends his already hyperactive imagination spiraling toward paranoia. Gordon becomes convinced that ghosts and other weird entities inhabit a daimonic reality that can interact with our everyday world. He starts seeing mystery and danger everywhere in his isolated farming community. He even thinks his best friend, Jimmy, might be possessed by demons....
JUNE 7th, 1979: Reality catches up with Gordon's worst imaginings on the day after his thirteenth birthday, when his father dies by crashing a Cessna into the living room of their house. Gordon sets out to discover whether the plane crash was an accident or something far more sinister. Before he finds the answer, he'll experience puberty, Pink Floyd, trout fishing, lesbian vampire movies, and midnight cliff-diving with the Hells Angels—all while learning to cope with the trauma-induced narcolepsy that inspires his nickname, Crash Gordon....
HALLOWEEN, 1982: Gordon meets Jimmy's Uncle Lloyd, an obscenely rich insurance broker to the rocket industry who makes Woodward and Bernstein's Deep Throat look like a low-level bureaucrat. With Lloyd acting as their demented mentor, Gordon and his friends embark on a road trip to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. Along the way, Lloyd lectures them about such diverse topics as hypnotism, assassination theories, MKULTRA, COINTELPRO, and the kidnapping of Patty Hearst; serial killers, satanic sacrifices, interdimensional energy portals, and the remote viewing program at the Stanford Research Institute; shamanism, ayahuasca, Terence McKenna's tryptamine-fueled encounters with the Logos, and the role "future causality" plays in the world's current fate. And that's only a prelude to Lloyd's startling explanation of how Gordon and Jimmy have become unwitting participants in a CIA mind control experiment known as Project MONARCH....
Click to view on Amazon: Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg
Like I said before, this is a very long book. That being said, that is not necessarily a bad thing. While the material was sometimes very very dense, I thoroughly enjoyed the book. There was a lot of humor in this book. I found myself laughing out loud plenty of times, Derek/Darren is a hilariously witty writer.
I loved Gordon, I loved him when he was a smarty pants seven-year-old, and I loved him when he was a horny teen with narcolepsy. All of the characters were pretty great, they were all very vivid. I love when writers create a character that I love to hate. I hated Mal and Cynthia. Oh man, I hated them so much, which was such a great feeling. I'll admit it, I'm a hater, so when authors hand me characters like these I just want to send them a box of chocolates or something. Imagine the worst possible parents, then mix in some weird satanic rituals and you have got these guys. Besides the parents there are some complicated characters like Jimmy, who tried to kill Gordon, yet still stood by him as he got older. The interactions between all of these characters were so funny and genuine that I just had to keep reading. I have to say that my favorite character was Derek Swannson speaking from the womb. That was such a unique concept, and he did fill in a bunch of information while being hilarious. The story also took some crazy turns that normally I would be rolling my eyes at, but with all the philosophy going on, the weird plot twists made a lot more sense.
Now, Philosophy. This is the part that really slowed me down while I was reading. The first couple times that the book delved into philosophy it was easy to follow along, but as the book went on it got more complicated. I have to say though, that the author really did try to break it down to make it clear, and even took several different approaches to explain the ideas. It was just hard for me to grasp sometimes. And there were so many references to so many different writers and poets, and so many different religions, that I kept wondering how the author knew all of that stuff. It took a bit of effort to keep it all straight, and I think some of it went over my head, but what I did grasp kept me up at night mulling over it. The book really makes you think about life and our souls and spirits. It also had me looking up gnostic religion, and even Scientology because I got confused for a second when the aliens and lizard men started showing up.
Over all I think that I would give this book a 4 out of 5 stars, because it was good, I just feel like I didn't grasp everything that I needed to in order to fully understand the story.
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