An epileptic named Tommy Aristophanos
begins Beneath the Coyote Hills by introducing himself
as a “loser,” a homeless outcast living in a tumble-down
shack in an olive grove in southern California. He uses his
innate skills to build a clay stove and brings home any abandoned
furniture he can use; he also taps into the powerline nearby
and is eventually able to hook up an air-conditioner he purloined
from a derelict house and brought to his hovel in a shopping
cart. He’s also able to plug in his computer and use
it as a word-processor to continue composing a novel he has
been writing since his bygone days at Stanford, a university
from which he never graduated. Given his calling as an author,
he believes he doesn’t need the type of cookie-cutter
education college has to offer. Life lived the way Tommy lives
it gives him its own Darwinian schooling, wherein only those
tough, resilient and resourceful enough survive.
He tells us that his childhood was normal, until his father
lost his job and took to the bottle and later brought his
fanatical version of Jesus into the mix. Tommy’s mother
fell into a deep depression, from which she never recovered;
his brother Zack couldn’t tolerate Tommy’s falling
sickness spells and turned against him, convinced that his
little brother was “mentally ill.” Tommy claims
he’s not mentally ill, “only neurologically impaired.”
In any case, Zack becomes a bully who makes Tommy’s
daily life even more unbearable. He states that one thing
he learned from his family was “that the only certain
thing about life is its uncertainty”—an observation
as true as the inevitable triumph of death.
Later as a grownup, he tried striving for what some might
call the American way—a steady job, decent clothes,
a nice house, a car, a wife and a baby. “I’d been
indoctrinated, like every American kid, to believe that life
is a rock climb: you secure hold after hold until you reach
the top.” He struggled to make that ambition pay off,
but his fits eventually rendered him incapable of not only
holding a job, but even holding his own child without an inner
terror telling him he was going to drop her, possibly even
kill her. In deep despair, he finally abandons his family
and moves to what is known as “The Valley of Failure,”
where he stumbles upon the hut that will become his dwelling
place throughout most of the novel. Luvaas uses flashbacks
and various sections of the biographical manuscript Tommy
is writing to bring us up to date with his past and its meandrous
motions, which continue to carry him closer and closer to
a fateful conclusion that feels inevitable once you get there
238 pages later.
Within what is a fascinating and multi-layered narrative,
the reader is introduced to a host of characters who populate
the valley. Each in his/her own way a unique example of a
quotation Luvaas borrows and modifies from Leo Tolstoy’s
Anna Karenina: [“All happy families are alike,
but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”].
Luvaas changes the quotation to: All successful people
are alike, but all failed people are failures in their own
way. Tommy finds it ironic that successful people believe
they have created their own fate—“when in truth
their lives follow the same clichéd plot line written
by a ghost writer lacking imagination. It is us f----ups who
author our own biographies. Each of us fails in our own peculiar
way.” It is an intriguing thesis for which the remaining
pages of the book offer ample support.
For example, there is Cleo, a Bohemian beauty who strikes
out on her own in order to have adventures and suck dry the
marrow of life. Tommy falls in love with her and wants her
to stay with him. She cares for him, but she can’t stay.
The unknown is calling to her. She leaves and then shows up
many pages later with a harrowing story of a recent experience
she had with a perverted old couple who tied her up in a shed
and used her as their personal sex slave, until she escaped
and, half dead, finally made her way back to Tommy’s
place. One would think she would stay there, but she doesn’t.
As soon as she is well enough, she takes off on her own to
continue searching for the reckless, adventurous life she
craves. Like a surreal dream, she’ll show up again and
again.
Enter a flashback passage concerning Karma and Woody who
cheat Tommy by pilfering a business he had founded making
soapstone pipes to sell to head shops and liquor stores. This
is his first and only venture into the world of capitalism
and when the pipes become a sellout phenomenon, he isn’t
prepared to deal with the likes of “sweet” Karma
and rapacious Woody after they move in, take over and leave
him penniless.
Insert Lizard Man into the equation, “a lesion in my
brain,” as Tommy tells: a horrid hallucination who presages
Tommy’s seizures. And then also an ancient “spook”
named Tahquitz shows up to “haunt” him. Tommy
describes him (or it?) as “a specter of shimmering gray
light against the backdrop of night, cowl-shaped head and
legs thin and scaly as a chicken’s.” Soboba Indians
believe that Tahquitz eats souls out of living bodies.
Next on the list of crazies is Berkeley Don. He arrives as
“a prophet of doom” who encounters the devil and
warns of species die-off, rising sea levels and freakish weather.
All of the above-named characters (excepting Cleo) end up
failing in their quests to master themselves and others.
Into Tommy’s life will likewise come a pair of vigilantes
promising revenge on those who bring pain or horror or death
to the innocent failures living in the Valley. The intrepid
duo takes Tommy under their collective wing and literally
saves his life when two bullies decide to destroy him and
everything he owns. The list of memorable personalities goes
on for numerous pages and supports observations written by
several critics who see William Luvaas as endlessly creative,
his imagination seething with wisdom and wide-ranging knowledge,
not only about the world itself, but also about the idiosyncrasies
of our raving species gone or going completely mad.
Which brings us to Volt. Tommy’s novel-within-a-novel
is about Volt and his silver-spooned life, his endless successes
throughout his early and later years, his world-wide corporations,
and his offshore locations hiding his money from the IRS.
Throw in the fact that he is handsome and alpha-male-manly,
an unbeaten cage fighter, an incomparable lover, a thriving
womanizer, a sociopath devoid of conscience, and you have
a daunting opponent. He correspondingly has a son growing
up to be just like him, an emblem of those rich, ungenerous
men and women of the future insuring themselves against failure
as generation follows generation.
Is Volt an alter ego? Is he an illustration of what Tommy
wishes he could be? Or perhaps a sample of what no one should
be? Tommy creates him by writing about him. Then in a warped
moment that is hard to see coming, Tommy meets his own creation
in the flesh. Is he real or another seizure, a dream spell?
It feels real enough and brings Tommy to a dilemma: should
a man as vicious and revolting as Volt be allowed to continue
his evil ways? Or should the author who brought him to life
burn the manuscript in order to wipe away what is, in fact,
a living curse of gluttonous capitalism?
He’s uncertain about what to do. Should he destroy
the manuscript or not? If he publishes it, he might end up
rich and famous. Isn’t that what we all want? Riches
and Fame. Then we’ll be happy. We will be Successful,
the envy of all those who aren’t. At one point, Tommy
concludes that “The rest of the world laughs at our
success/failure hang-up. Polls show we are one of the unhappiest
peoples on earth. We kill each other and ourselves more than
anyone else, we can’t stay married, we don’t educate
our kids, we trample each other in our race to the top. And
to the head-shaking world we say, ‘Go f--- yourself…losers.’”
William Luvaas has written a soul-searching novel that comes
authentically out of his own bouts with epilepsy, which have
plagued him for decades. His riveting tale is filled with
questions that are never entirely answered except, perhaps,
by those insightful few who follow its vivid scenes and unparalleled
passages depicting the sad state of our poor planet and the
gibbering of our politicians and the brutal, venomous mood
ubiquitous everywhere. Luvaas has caught the essence of countless
lives lived as if they all suffer from Tommy’s paranoia
and, psychologically, share his spells, wherein each
sees demons living inside everyone except those clued-up selves
whose opinions matter more than someone else’s facts,
and the so-called truths of Science are mostly a pack of lies.
The planet isn’t dying. It’s all a hoax. America
is the greatest nation on Earth. Our wars are always righteous
and should never be referred to as projects created out of
trickery and deceit or anything else dishonorable.
Beneath the Coyote Hills reveals a brilliant writer
confronting a vast number of small and large issues that are
twisting and tainting our lives in ways most of us cannot
comprehend or even imagine. In Tommy Aristophanos, Luvaas
has invented the perfect partner to utter what appear to be
his own prophetic visions about a future that seems, at this
point, not only troubling, but quite possibly inescapable
as well.
Let Tommy have the last word:
“I’m trying to make a point here. You are my
main character[s] and I’m urging you to do the right
thing. Doesn’t an author have a right to do that? You
should listen to me.” [reviewer’s
emphasis]
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