Fear in a Handful of Dust

by John Ives and Brian Garfield

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0892961317
• Release Date: January 1985
• Publisher: Mysterious Pr
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Amazing resourcefulness in most extreme survival situation.

27-year-old Calvin Duggai, found not guilty of five manslaughter charges by reason of criminal insanity, has been committed indefinitely to a Californian hospital for the criminally insane. A Navajo Indian, he had gone with five companions (one from another Indian tribe) into the Mohave Desert to look for brass shell casings ejected from Air Force planes during gunnery practice, and had driven out of the desert, stranding his companions there without water after a quarrel with the other Indian about whose witchcraft was stronger. Duggai had stranded them there to test whether the other Indian's magic could help them survive there. The mental hospital is pure hell for Duggai, who feels even more degraded and humiliated in that environment than he would have in a prison. It is especially alien to him, as an Indian who is expert in living in wild country. Five years after being committed, he manages to break out after being transferred to a lower-security facility - and he has one thought in his mind: to wreak vengeance on the four psychiatric witnesses at his trial whose testimony sent him to the hospital. In accordance with a carefully laid-out plan, he steals a pickup truck with a camper mounted on the back, and in turn visits the residences of the four people concerned, bailing them up at gunpoint, binding their hands behind them with coathanger wire and herding them into the camper, where he secures them hand and foot to fixtures and gags them, and locks them in: there is not the slightest chance of them escaping. Four prisoners, with obvious tensions simmering between them: Jay and Shirley Painter, whose marriage is falling apart; Sam Mackenzie (the main viewpoint character of the novel), half-Navajo and with an attraction for Shirley, which resulted in his wife committing suicide; and Earle Dana, the psychotherapist and writer whom the others regard as something of a quack, at whose dinner party things finally blew up between Jay and Shirley, which is what precipitated Audrey's suicide. Duggai drives the four of them in their mobile prison cell deep into the desert, where he releases and unties them, strips them naked and leaves them completely without any provisions whatsoever. He drives off, having used his revolver as a club to break Earle Dana's leg, thus leaving him immobile; but occasional distant growls suggest that the pickup camper is not far off, and that Duggai wants to watch them die, like a vulture. No-one could possibly survive in such a desert naked and totally without any equipment; but they manage to survive with very nearly nothing: their only tools to begin with are a folded plastic raincoat which Mackenzie managed to kick out the camper door as Duggai escorted him out, some brass ammunition shells he finds in the desert, which can be converted to knives, and Shirley's long hair, which has numerous uses. With this slender base, they manage to obtain ground