Earthquake Weather
Good Fit
- Readers who have finished Last Call and Expiration Date and want to complete the trilogy
- Fans of secret history — real-world geography and events interwoven with a mystical layer
- Readers willing to patiently track a large ensemble cast and a slowly-unfolding mythology
- Fans of surreal, non-linear prose in the vein of Philip K. Dick
Not a Fit
- Readers wanting to start the series here without reading the first two books — this is written as a direct continuation, with no recap of prior events
- Anyone looking for a simple, linear adventure novel with a small cast
- Readers sensitive to depictions of self-harm and bodily injury
The book opens with a news-clipping epigraph — a small earthquake in Boulder City on January 2, 1995 — hinting that it will prove significant.
Chapter 1 opens in a diner near San Diego: a tense blonde woman orders breakfast, smokes and sets a book smoldering, and answers a payphone call in a different, harsher voice — a sign that she carries more than one personality. She masks the smell of alcohol with Listerine, wounds her own thigh with a small three-pronged spear hidden in her clothes, then drives to the coast to nail up a makeshift grave marker.
Fifteen minutes after this scene, the Hoover Dam shudders, and strange storms and small earthquakes strike the California coast from San Francisco to San Diego — presented not as mere natural phenomena but as the physical echo of the book's "Fisher King" mythology.
The parallel thread opens with fourteen-year-old Koot Hoomie "Kootie" Sullivan in Long Beach — he wakes in terror from a dream of a woman running through a garden with a bloody spear, then finds, with his landlady, the corpses of three "ghost-eaters" in the backyard.
The "ghost-eaters" — per Kootie's description — are long-lived, wandering beings without normal human anatomy, with fewer internal organs than a sea snail; the deceased landlady used to give them Christmas candies, since they can't digest organic food.
Kootie's adoptive parents, Pete and Angelica Sullivan, enter the scene — their own unusual past (familiar to readers of the earlier books) is hinted at briefly but not explained in this chapter.
- The narrative shifts rapidly between a large ensemble cast, with each scene handing off to a different thread in the next chapter
- Grounded, concrete realist detail (diner menus, San Diego geography) sits in sharp contrast with the supernatural elements
- Dialogue is terse and functional, often dropping indirect clues about a character's hidden identity
- Dark humor (like the ghost-eaters' fondness for Christmas candy) sits alongside grim, visceral detail
Book 1 of the same "Fault Lines" trilogy, where this novel's Fisher King mythology begins
Book 2 of the trilogy, where Kootie's storyline begins
A similar secret-history/mythic-America genre
Short answer: on the final night at the Point Lobos rocks, Arky Mavranos gives up his body and Scott Crane comes back alive out of the sea. At dawn, in the Marina cove, the debt of a death is paid with Sid Cochran's blood, and Cody Plumtree survives. Five months later Crane begins the wedding ceremony of Sid and Cody.
That night Cochran, Cody Plumtree, Pete Sullivan, Angelica, Arky Mavranos and Kootie gather on the slope by the sea. Armed motorcyclists attack, treating Kootie as king but wanting a king of their own, and Mavranos is shot in the stomach in the crossfire. Dr. Armentrout follows the king by the pull of the pomegranate, but Long John Beach knocks him down from behind and holds him.
On the ledge by the shore, Kootie drinks the god Dionysus's wine and collapses; Mavranos takes the bottle and drinks the bloody wine himself. Then, facing the wooden-masked Dionysus, he calls to Crane, «jump this way»; Dionysus throws him off the ledge into the sea, and Boybos Thutmose leaps after him. The cliff shakes, hail falls, and after a while Crane climbs out of the sea, naked and bleeding from a wound in his belly. Cody says that Arky gave Crane his own body and that Crane turned it into his own; Crane accepts this.
Riding to the Marina in the back of the truck, Omar Salvoy's voice speaks through Cody: the debt of a death still stands, Mavranos only supplied the body, and Plumtree must die. Cochran volunteers. By the water the faces inside Cody fade one by one; to Cochran it seems that Janis dies and takes Salvoy, Tiffany and all the rest with her as she goes, while Cody remains. Armentrout shatters Cochran's right hand with a gunshot; the dog Fred knocks him down, and two ghosts press Armentrout under the water and drown him. As Cochran's blood runs onto the sand, the ghosts of Mrs. Winchester and Mother Pleasant approach, and Crane tells them to leave the warm blood behind and board the boat.
In the epilogue five months have passed, and it is midsummer. Crane says he will spend every January in Erebus and come back through a rite brought by the three agents of death, and he swallows a pomegranate seed. Cochran has lost his hand; he now works as a sales representative and wears a white glove over his right wrist. On the shore of the lake on the hilltop, Crane, acting as a kind of priest, calls Cody Plumtree and Sid Cochran forward; Cochran is ready to take his vow in the king's presence. According to the newspapers, Armentrout has escaped and vanished.
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