Otis: On the Occasion of His Foray into the Wilderness of Civilization

"Paul Allman's Otis is an odyssey and a bawdy one. Jumping with vigorous prose and fearless imagination, this first novel joins the brass of classic American fiction with a blast of American jazz that comes bouncing off the walls and mirrors of a carnival fun-house. But seething under it all, like the grit of the Mississippi's waters, are the dense and dark issues of American poverty, random violence, and cultural ownership." "Otis, a Missouri virgin-boy, is sent on a wrong-headed errand by his father; Otis's mission - to dam the Mississippi River. Pursuing this end, Otis loses his bearings, his virginity, his home, his name, and yes, his innocence. He's seduced by a charming but sinister set of improbable twins who command a religious camp, the Holy Habitat. Otis is recruited by the twins to rescue the cult's mysterious lost goddess from her confinement in the redemptive chaos of New York, where he becomes entangled in a spiral of revenge that he cannot control." "Befuddled and deranged by a combination of his agreeable nature and terrible luck, Otis careens from one set of earth-shakers to another, enduring a series of mishaps, miscalculations, detours, and disasters. He encounters, among others, the ghosts of the Lakeshore Limited, a blind cameraman, a mysterious Pomeranian, incompetent anarchists, and a forlorn ex-baseball pitcher in search of his strike zone." "And Otis, an impressionable young hero as tall and unusual as the tale he inhabits, finds himself at large in a world quite different from his native Braggadocio County."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved… (more)