Coyote — Peter Gadol

Imagine a desert landscape of immense beauty and fearsome loneliness, where meteorite showers trail through a stark sky and puncture the terrain below, and where solitary people gather to find themselves and maybe even solace and love. This is the setting of Coyote, a first novel by Peter Gadol, a writer of gentle wit and genuine wisdom.

The hero of Coyote is a young man named Coyote Gato, a loner who has spent his life wandering the desert of the American Southwest. Coyote believes he was mystically conceived beneath the desert's Great Tree; he also believes he can turn himself into a cat. Now, at age twenty-one, he makes his living by removing all the street signs near the dying desert town of Frescura so he can guide potential pilgrims to a mysterious local ashram.

One hot summer day, Coyote hitches a ride with Madeleine Nash, a veteran journalist on a mission to investigate the ever more powerful and secretive cult that runs the ashram. Madeleine, too, is a loner. Her own tragic secret has led her back to the harshly beautiful desert she once knew well.

In an atmosphere of free love, cosmic longings, a little magic, and occasional folly, Coyote and Madeleine explore an ashram that has become an oasis for disoriented people dressed in mauve jumpsuits and looking for salvation. It's presided over by one Guru B - no one knows what the B stands for - who wears eight wristwatches at a time, owns more than seventy sports cars, and smiles spiritually and frequently, but who never speaks. The ashram's secrets include the whereabouts of the giant, glistening meteorite that was stolen from Coyote's mentor, the renegade physicist and astronomer Frog Reading.