detour

A creative experiment became the method for this wild and surreal imaginative dream journey. The year was 1975. Tom Lucas had graduated from college and was about to record his first cd album ("Tom Lucas Red Letter"). In the years ahead he would continue to write poetry and fiction while composing and recording 3 more albums of original songs. Finished with writing the Vietnam novel "Raging Mice" - the author and singer-songwriter wrote this award-winning experimental novel inspired by his own experiences as an 18 year old draftee infantryman - he approached his new writing project as a creative experiment that avoided what he had come to believe was a stale predictability in the literary genre of the novel.

Inspired by studies of C.G. Jung and other pioneers of the human mind and creative process, he drew on his own intense work with dreams; he avoided a pre-set theme or plot. Instead, he would rein in his critical intellect and defer to his subconscious where he would either discover a meaningless void of "word salad", or, perhaps some kind of narrative structure and psychological center.

The result is "detour", an innovative "novel" punctuated by a self reflexive narrator in search of solidity. Here the path is overcome by detours of comic misdirection and cultural satire that include a pontificating swine that morphs into bacon and 'glass people' who melt parts of themselves as a form of self entertainment. Readers are warned by the author to enter this evocative and challenging fiction 'at their own risk'.