The Saga of Lightning Bolt Bob — C.J. Howard

Lightning Bolt Bob's story is a series of mishaps a life that moves from one weird story in the news to another. Conceived on the fourth green of a golf course during a thunderstorm Bob's life would always be affected by lightning. As the book begins Bob is jumping from a small plane as it taxies down the runway in OKC. Bob is being transported from the local jail to a maximum-security prison. A tornado threatens and Bob takes his destiny into his own hands. Destiny, most of it awful, has always played a part in Bob's life. When he was three his father, Rodney, deserted Priscilla, his wife, and Bob. He left during a raging downpour, ostensibly to buy cigarettes. He never returned. Although Rodney and Priscilla didn't have a great love affair, they had married because of her pregnancy. Priscilla sank into a deep depression. She too abandoned Bob when she never returned from her stay at a state mental institution. When Bob learned of her discharge he waited for her watching at the window of his grandmother's squalid home. For three days, a violent storm pummeled the small house when the sky cleared Bob expected his mom to return, but she did not and no one knew her whereabouts. Bob would spend the rest of his young years searching for his parents when he wasn't incarcerated. Bob's first foray into the penal system was at sixteen. He glued the front doors of his high school shut. However, a bottle of glue with his fingerprints was found at the scene. From then on Bob would be in and out of the prison system. Bob got the handle Lightning Bolt when a fellow inmate found him enthralling and he became the wife of the biggest guy at Riverbend Max in Tennessee. A birthmark in the shape of a lightning bolt graced his backside. Big Earl saw it and christened him Lightning Bolt Bob. Other inmates covetous of his relationship with Earl cornered him in the shower one night and carved a lightning bolt tattoo on his forehead. If you enjoy the books of Carl Hiaasen, Tom Robbins and Christopher Moore you will laugh at the events in this one too.