In Earthy Vessels by David T. Isaak, Crystal Keeling encounters a mystical power that sends her on a journey of true chaos.
Crystal wasn’t necessarily seeking spiritual enlightenment on the streets of Manhattan, but there were certainly plenty of fools and charlatans peddling it back in 1969 – as well as both legal and illegal means of achieving ‘higher consciousness’ one way or another.
Fortunately – and unfortunately – for Crystal, the man who found her, cult leader Anton Reginald LaMarr, and his Children of Pan were the real deal, whether they knew it or not. They had discovered a ritual that could draw down the soul of a Hero, and planned to implant that Hero’s soul into Crystal – using the usual orgiastic methods.
Crystal was fine with the ritual sex but had not signed up for imprisonment and pregnancy. She ran far and fast and never looked back.
When she discovered that she really was pregnant despite the birth control regimen she religiously maintained, she took it in stride – as did all the other members of whichever commune or co-op she happened to be living in at the time.
The child, however, a boy she named Rainbow Bounty, rebelled against her counterculture lifestyle every bit as much as Crystal had rebelled against her conservative upbringing before him.
Thus, readers follow Rainbow Bounty, who calls himself by his initials RB, pronounced ‘Arby’, because having people in the early 2000s think you’re named for a brand of fast food is much better than advertising that your mother was and still is a ‘flower child’. Arby makes his way from a job in the oil fields of Bahrain to Portland, Oregon because his mother hinted that there is a life-threatening event on the horizon.
But she’s not the one whose life is about to be threatened and thrown off its course.
The ritual that gave Arby life is about to come crashing down on his head – one way or another – and the fate of the world rests on him reconnecting with the abilities of his past lifetimes.
Whether those abilities will help or hinder is a crapshoot of the highest order, because Arby isn’t the avatar of some long-dead Hero or God. That would be much too easy. Arby is, as he has so often been in his life, the avatar of chaos, the embodiment of Murphy’s Law.
Arby is destiny’s Fool, and his purpose is to cast all plans into disarray. Even his own.
Earthly Vessels, beginning as it does in the counterculture movement of the 1960s, reads with a sense of nostalgia for that brief era, and Crystal’s acceptance of and equally brief involvement with the Children of Pan fits right in with books of the time, from the Harrad Experiment to Stranger in a Strange Land.
As the story moves from Crystal to Arby, a different perspective emerges, as the reader learns Arby’s place in the post-9/11 world right along with him. Arby discovers his expected role at a compelling pace, as there are forces beyond his understanding searching for him – on both sides of the cosmic balance that human shorthand calls ‘good’ and ‘evil’.
The scope of Arby’s story, diving deeply into that longest of long-running battles, with avatars fighting on both sides of the divide, will remind readers of both Good Omens and American Gods.
Earthly Vessels is both a deep exploration of the philosophy of the cosmos and a compelling thriller in one breathless story.
Arby is a protagonist readers can easily empathize with, an Everyman who rises to an occasion he never dreamed was possible, doing his damnedest along a path he doesn’t fully understand.
This story will keep readers turning pages as fast as they can, from the first until the surprising, fitting, and delightful last.
The wheels roll relentlessly westward. In Stay with the Wagons, book 3 of David Fitz-Gerald’s Ghosts Along the Oregon Trail series, the families upon those wheels must face not only the consequences of the trail behind them but also new dangers that lie ahead.
In Mistress of Legend, the enticing finale of Nicole Evelina’s Guinevere’s Tale trilogy, matters are life-and-death by the second sentence, pulling readers deep into Guinevere’s fate in this retelling of Arthurian legend.
God, the Mafia, My Dad, and Me by Lori Lee Peters begins in the voice of a child, compelling not just for its narrative honestly, but for the fact that it might not be reliable. As the book opens, we learn that this narrator firmly believes she will be killed.
Quantum Consequences, the fifth book in the Physics, Lust, and Greed Series by Mike Murphy, mixes conflicts from the past, present, and future as a group of time travelers clash over the fate of multiple worlds.
You Can’t Fool a Mermaid by Judy Keeslar Santamaria is a glorious dance of well-intentioned ghosts. In the words of Violet, a twenty-one-year-old pianist, it’s “bewitching as hell.”
