Desert Oracle: Volume 1: Strange True Tales from the American Southwest

by Ken Layne

Overview

The cult-y pocket-size field guide to the strange and intriguing secrets of the Mojave—its myths and legends, outcasts and oddballs, flora, fauna, and UFOs—becomes the definitive, oracular book of the desert

For the past five years, Desert Oracle has existed as a quasi-mythical, quarterly periodical available to the very determined only by subscription or at the odd desert-town gas station or the occasional hipster boutique, its canary-yellow-covered, forty-four-page issues handed from one curious desert zealot to the next, word spreading faster than the printers could keep up with. It became a radio show, a podcast, a live performance. Now, for the first time—and including both classic and new, never-before-seen revelations—Desert Oracle has been bound between two hard covers and is available to you.

Straight out of Joshua Tree, California, Desert Oracle is “The Voice of the Desert”: a field guide to the strange tales, singing sand dunes, sagebrush trails, artists and aliens, authors and oddballs, ghost towns and modern legends, musicians and mystics, scorpions and saguaros, out there in the sand. Desert Oracle is your companion at a roadside diner, around a campfire, in your tent or cabin (or high-rise apartment or suburban living room) as the wind and the coyotes howl outside at night.

From journal entries of long-deceased adventurers to stray railroad ad copy, and musings on everything from desert flora, rumored cryptid sightings, and other paranormal phenomena, Ken Layne's Desert Oracle collects the weird and the wonderful of the American Southwest into a single, essential volume.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374139681
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	12/08/2020
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.60(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Ken Layne is the creator of Desert Oracle, the cult-favorite periodical and radio show, and author of the bestselling Desert Oracle Vol. 1 from MCD Books.

Table of Contents

Introduction 3

Try Not to Die 9

The Known Unknown: Tales of Yucca Man 19

The Boy Who Vanished 33

Ravens 37

Doc Springer's Last Word in Health: Zzyzx 41

Horror of the Solar Lodge 47

Eulogy for a Space Mission 57

The White Stag 63

Apostle of the Cacti 67

Fighting Hitler and Defending the Desert 71

The Hermit Ballerina 75

Outlaw in the Rocks 83

Magic and War in Los Alamos with William S. Burroughs 87

The Landers Earthquake 97

Hidden Cities and Secret Creatures of Death Valley 105

Marty Robbins on the Cowboy Trail from Phoenix to El Paso 119

Edward Abbey's Ode to Solitude 125

Rambling Around with Ed Abbey 133

Scary Stories Around the Campfire 147

Pahranagat Man: Area 51's Ancient Monster 159

Cowboys and Poets 177

A Day Hike to Hell and Back 181

Philosophy on the Rocks 187

The Murder King of Western Swing 191

La Llorona Is Coming to Drown All the Children 219

Wonder Valley 227

When Eisenhower Met the Space Aliens 233

The Krill Papers 239

Dr. Jaeger's Hibernating Bird 247

The Devil (?) in Amboy Crater 255

When the Nights Were Weird: Art Bell and the Kingdom of Nye 263

The Governor's Space Alien 269

Broadcasts from Beyond 275

Acknowledgments 285

Editorial Reviews

10/19/2020

Layne (Dignity) delivers a playful potpourri of lore, obscure facts, geographic meditations, and conservationist advocacy in this eclectic collection of desert-themed essays. The author presents the desert as a home worthy of protecting and suggests it is a source of meaning. “There is purpose waiting out here, for anyone who comes in honest pursuit of it,” he writes in the introduction, and the essays that follow tell how he and others found such purpose. An empathetic essay on “wandering philosopher” Edward Abbey imagines wilderness as “a haven for outlaws,” and essays on UFOs and the Yucca Man tackle myths with humor and curiosity. Several pieces provide something of a cultural history of the American Southwest, covering the legacy of Marty Robbins’s western music, William Burroughs’s time in Los Alamos, and the cultish “Solar Lodge.” Layne concludes with a poetically pitched message to keep the desert “a wild, open landscape available for our encounters with the mysterious and the divine.” With his succinct, descriptive, narrative-driven prose, Layne creates a fascinating homage to the beauty of an often unforgiving landscape. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

12/01/2020

Desert Oracle started out under the guidance of journalist Layne as a quarterly periodical collecting stories relating to the desert environment of the American Southwest. The periodical later became a radio show, podcast, and live performance, all focusing on the people and places located in the Mojave, either by accident or by design. The book version of the periodical is a field guide of sorts of the Southwest, featuring both previously published and new entries documenting life in and around the Mojave. The rugged environment attracts a certain type of outsider, and many of the essays feature desert outlaws, such as author Edward Abbey and biologist Edmund Jaeger. Cautionary tales of unprepared hikers shed further insight into the dangers of this harsh environment. UFO enthusiasts, mythical desert creatures including the Yucca Man and La Llorona, and natural history accounts of the flora and fauna found in the desert are all included in this slim volume. VERDICT Anyone contemplating a trip to the arid Southwest or wanting to learn more about the area and its natural history should pick up this collection of varied anecdotes.—Diana Hartle, Univ. of Georgia Science Lib., Athens

Library Journal

2020-09-16
Mojave Desert rat Layne veers between the occult and the pedestrian in this mixed bag of essays.

For a fan of arid lands, the author’s heart is in the right place: He celebrates a Mojave Desert ecosystem that, though heavily gnawed at the edges, is protected such that it’s the second largest desert wilderness in the world. “Out here, beyond the robotic grip of a civilization in disarray and despair, I promise you will feel human again, if only for a little while,” he writes in a neo-Thoreauvian vein. Layne celebrates neighbors who live in his clime within sight of the Joshua trees of southern California, some anti-social, some criminal, some reptilian in their worship of the sun. The author is a card-carrying believer in the eldritch, writing about the “Sierra Highway Devil,” a local emanation of the chupacabra; and the vast underground lakes that, miners swear, lie deep beneath the ancient beds of Death Valley. Layne also looks at the possibility of flying saucers (“When fighter jets were scrambled, the fast-moving objects vanished from the sky, only to return when the fighter jets landed for refueling”) and shows his appreciation for the late Art Bell, who broadcast outlandish theories about secret hangars where felled extraterrestrial aircraft have been stored. Bell’s radio show always aired late at night, when the listener would receive it in suitably eerie settings, “driving a deserted highway, or fighting insomnia, or working a graveyard shift under fluorescent lights.” It’s entertaining bunkum, though probably best for like-minded readers who buy assertions such as “our natural world functions as a supernatural habitat for an intelligence that has accompanied mankind since the beginning of our time.” Still, such oddities are at least more original than his past-sell-date notes on such desert icons as Edward Abbey and Charlie Manson.

If you’re a fan of UFOs and insane heat, this is your book.

Kirkus Reviews

UFOs, doomed hikers, William Burroughs, singing sand dunes, Elvis, ghosts, roadrunners and rattlesnakes – the Desert Oracle packs a lot of weird, dark matter between its bright yellow covers.” —Dominic Rushe, The Guardian

“[Desert Oracle serves] as a field guide to a seemingly barren place that is paradoxically full of life and legends. [Layne] leads us into the Mojave Wilderness, a vast area containing gophers, coyotes, Yucca Man, a hermit ballerina, mysterious cacti, 10-foot-tall warriors, space aliens, and more.” —Blaise Zerega, Alta Magazine

“Anyone contemplating a trip to the arid Southwest or wanting to learn more about the area and its natural history should pick up this collection of varied anecdotes.” —Diana Hartle, Library Journal

“If you’re a fan of UFOs and insane heat, this is your book.”—Kirkus Reviews

“With his succinct, descriptive, narrative-driven prose, Layne creates a fascinating homage to the beauty of an often unforgiving landscape.” —Publishers Weekly

“The desert is a powerful cocktail of breathtaking beauty, brutality, and mystery. Layne serves it straight-up in this collection of essays dedicated to his cherished, arid homeland . . . [Desert Oracle] is a soulful love letter to the rugged landscape of the American Southwest. Layne implores readers to preserve and protect the enigmatic and wild desert. Reading this book is like swapping tales around the campfire under a star-filled sky.”—Michelle Ross, Booklist

From the Publisher