Publisher's Synopsis
The Spontaneous Generation is the first novel in The HOOCH Trilogy, followed by HOOCH and Drug War Archipelago. The Spontaneous Generation traces the early rise of Henry Oliver Oliver Church, or "Hooch," a typical teen, accused of murder, who runs away from his sleepy hometown of Tucson, Arizona, lighting out for broader shores, in the summer of pre-love 1966. The Spontaneous Generation tails Hooch on his hitchhike across America's heartland: an explosive phantasmagoria, Hooch's kaleidoscoping dreams lighting up the U. S. A. with ruby deserts, castles out of emerald Southern savannas, and awakening Appalachians from the arcane constellations of his red-rimmed sleep. Fueling himself with candy bars and Royal Crown Colas, Hooch, lucid through a racially-divided South and a war-torn North, soon inhabits a mimetic space-time that unfolds the fate of his speeding flight, shadowed by cops, down ghostly Interstates, Orestes sleeping in culverts, peopled with dandelions. Behind Hooch lay on lugubrious couches the collective masses (oh those sad old alcoholics!) of "the greatest generation," the tubal consumers of middle-class stupors, and the merry-go-round of gray flannel conformity. Hooch winds up in the Big Apple. At first as alienated labor, eyeless at the mills, working a lunch pail job, Hooch lives at the YMCA. Enough of that jazz. Hooch's nose for the Zeitgeist leads him out of that Egypt. Hooch joins the East Village's Family for Communal Living, another artificial paradise, produced by a Leary-like lecturer, Luke Bartholomew, whose magic lantern consists of a loosely-tied kibbutz of "seekers for the truth," united on their utopiate island by hopes of a new age now beginning. And when prophecy fails, Hooch is there to provide the comfort grass. Counter-cultural ethno-botanical lessons in growing up surreal continue for the ensorcelled apprentice at the Family for Communal Living until police crash the pad, sparking the ever-present powder keg of discontented passersby to bloody riot. Homeless Hooch turns gopher, Hooch goes underground. He rubs shoulders with organized crime soldiers from the Genovese crime family who are just trying to make an honest living; but once entrapped in the bungled burglary of a Mafia captain, Hooch is again wanted by the authorities, this time by wormy hoodlums of the underworld. Scylla, Charybdis, reduced to squatting in abandoned buildings, Hooch be-bops around town, learning hard lessons from hard knocks, waiting for nothing to happen, and then when it finally does, down to his last pair of good odor socks, Hooch is busted, booked, and broken. Or, is, he, com-plete-ly bro-k-e-n? A Critique of Psychedelic Chaos, a parody of Sixties memoirs, a pastiche of true crime, a bildungsroman for a stoned Pip, The Spontaneous Generation clings to the coat-tails of Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an Opium Eater and continues on the descendant in the scrambled tradition of Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly and Stanislaw Witkiwicz' Insatiability.
