Round Earth, Open Sky

By Kirpal Gordon

Round Earth Open Sky is a work of speculative fiction in the form of a buddy road novel that turns into a psychological suspense thriller. On a back road in the Sonoran Desert, Moses, a landscape photographer returning to New York, hungover and down on his luck, pulls his car over at the sight of a poacher carrying a spear and a dead wolf on his shoulder. Calling himself Sky Man, the ragged, mysterious stranger turns out to be a desert shaman who heals ills, reads minds, travels through time and alleges that he is an immortal from another dimension tricked by human sorcery into the body of a dead human being. When he confides that he is bound for an imminent full moon reunion with his sky people, Moses, though he believes not a word, agrees to drive him, at least part of the way. But at every stop, just as his rider predicts, remarkable things happen. Moses' colorful, contrary and insightful friends-a Navaho waitress, an elder in Hopi-land, a private investigator and therapist team in Sedona and a lawyer ex-girlfriend in Detroit named Rainie-turn the shaman's story into a portal divulging multiple clues. Following the evidence, Moses and Sky Man meet the cryptic parents of the dead human being. Their beguiling revelations lure Sky Man, Moses and Rainie up to the family cabin at Borealis Cove on Lake Huron's Oanay Isle in Canada. There the trio discover that during the midsummer full moon, the daytime forest is alive with magic and the starry night teems with ancient visitors from the sky-and where each character undergoes a life-changing transformation.

"Part mystical vision, part cosmic joke, Round Earth Open Sky is Kirpal Gordon at the top of his game, by turns lyrical and ironic, magical and subversive, moving past the vanishing point where Jack Kerouac meets Carlos Castaneda. Gordon is a consummate postmodern trickster, wanting nothing more than 'to stir a little gray into the either/or, black-and-white world, ' leading us to laugh at what we think we know, and to humble ourselves to a world that will always be much larger than we can imagine."
Stephen-Paul Martin

"Gordon flirts with the borders of fantasy and science fiction to create a novel whose heightened reality entertains and illuminates simultaneously. When Sky Man literally falls to earth from a plane of existence beyond it, Moses becomes the first of many colorful and complex characters to try to determine what he is and whether his true nature lies in the heavens, the earth, or both. A highly entertaining journey."
Vernon Frazer

"In the middle of nowhere, a photographer gives a lift to a mysterious stranger and finds himself the passenger on a surprising, and sometimes sinister, journey toward discovery and self-revelation that carries them both through the perils of obscure Native American tribal rites to the portals of metempsychosis and the magical reality behind 'reality' which erases past and present and, at the same time, recreates them. Gordon unrolls a map that irresistibly lures its characters, and the reader, toward a spectacular life- and death-transforming climax."
Eric Basso.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B08BDSDRS3
• ISBN13: 9798614436179
• Release Date: June 2020
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 188 Pages
• Weight: 0.54 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.5" x 8.5"