Thirty years spent helping mega-corporations tell sustainability stories that were, charitably, aspirational — work that left me with a guilty conscience and a few genuine demons. A master's in English, concentration in writing and cultural theory, gave me somewhere to exorcize them.

John Rooks

Portland, Maine

mail@johnrooks.com

THE VOLCANO GOD

An upmarket, darkly comic literary novel about identity and the absurdities of contemporary culture laced with pop-culture shenanigans.

THE VOLCANO GOD is about man’s search for authenticity on a slippery surface. And violent escape from the discovery.

Zero-charisma, semi-divorced, middle-aged, and self-exiled, Bill Lee runs away from home in a reckless search for his one true identity. What he finds is unsatisfactory. Starting a cult and a book club along the way wasn’t supposed to be part of the journey. Neither was murder.

For fans of Chuck Klosterman, Warren Zevon and Tom Robbins — comic despair and deadpan escalation in the literary tradition of Sam Lipsyte's The Ask and Joshua Ferris's To Rise Again at a Decent Hour.