Beneath The Coyote Hills
Beneath The Coyote Hills enters the bizarre world of Tommy Aristophanos, a homeless epileptic visionary who lives in a hut he has built in an abandoned olive grove in California’s high desert. Tommy is tormented by spells that leave him unconscious or stumbling through dark fogs that blur the line between reality and illusion. Demons from his spell visions materialize in the flesh to torment him, including his dead father and predaceous Lizard Man. A hapless, though enterprising, freegan, Tommy survives on his wits and society’s leavings, while his fictional creation, V.C. Hoffstatter (Volt), is the rich and successful architect of a financial empire. He materializes in the flesh from pages of Tommy’s novel, and author and character face off in a battle of wills in a limbo between fiction and reality. Along the way, Tommy endures attacks by vigilante thugs, by marauding coyotes, and by a criminal organ transplant ring in Kosovo that steals one of his kidneys.
Praise for Beneath The Coyote Hills:
The primary strength of Luvaas’s fiction is in the vigor and lucidity of the writing, and these qualities are evident in Beneath The Coyote Hills.”
— Daniel Green, Los Angeles Review of Books
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/metafictional-machinations-william-luvaass-beneath-coyote-hills/#
“Within what is a fascinating and multi-layered narrative, the reader is introduced to a host of characters who populate the valley. Each in his/her own way a unique example of a quotation Luvaas borrows and modifies from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: [‘All happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’]. Luvaas changes the quotation to: All successful people are alike, but all failed people are failures in their own way. Tommy finds it ironic that successful people believe they have created their own fate—‘when in truth their lives follow the same clichéd plot line written by a ghost writer lacking imagination. It is us screw-ups who author our own biographies. Each of us fails in our own peculiar way.’ It is an intriguing thesis for which the remaining pages of the book offer ample support.”
— Duff Brenna, MyShelf.com
http://myshelf.com/literary/14/beneathcoyotehills.htm
“Luvaas has a way with words, especially dialogue. His dialogue is crisp and active, which keeps things moving along. And the novel is structured well. But remember, it’s a philosophical novel at heart. And in that sense, it’s almost religious in tenor, asking the question, like Job, “What did I do to deserve such suffering?”
— BlogCritics.org
http://blogcritics.org/book-review-beneath-the-coyote-hills-by-William-luvaas/
“Luminous and elegant writing–another tour de force from a master who practices what he preaches.”
— Gwendolen Gross, Author of Field Guide and When She Was Gone
“Beneath The Coyote Hills” has cost me a sleepless night that I can scarcely afford, and has left me cold with awe at the unwavering skill and subtlety of the narrative. The sheer scope of the author’s imagination, and the almost impossibly delicate poetic weight of his prose, has made the discovery of William Luvaas’s writing one of the genuine joys of my reading-year. He is a remarkable writer, comfortably among the finest at work in America today, and the novel is a towering and maybe career-defining achievement, art of the highest order.”
– Billy O’Callaghan, Irish Book Award-winning author of The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind
“With his third published novel, Beneath the Coyote Hills, master storyteller William Luvaas demonstrates once again his remarkable talent for creating over-the-top characters amd tragic lives that feel entirely true and believable. And he does so in his signature lyrical style of writing, brilliantly enhanced here by grace notes of hyperbole and humor and anti-heroic irony, juxtaposed with imagery in turn that’s realistic, viscerally affective, and relentless.”
– Clare MacQueen. Author, Editor-in-Chief of KYSO Flash
OTHER PRESS AND INTERVIEWS:
W3 SIDECAR INTERVIEW:
http://w3sidecar.tumblr.com/post/150137866550/william-luvaas
A NOVEL IDEA RADIO INTERVIEW with Suzanne Lange – KRCB Radio 91: NPR
http://media.krcb.org/podcasts/a_novel_idea/A_NOVEL_IDEA_SEP_04_2016.mp3
