America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: a Diagnostic, by Phillip Freedenberg, illustrated by Jeff Walton

First response from a reader/reviewer of note: “Written and illustrated during the final months of the Trump presidency, America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic transmogrifies that bizarre period into a dystopian fantasy about what might have happened had Trump and his totalitarian troglodytes triumphed. Metafictionally calling itself an “unreal, esoteric, exotic, metaphysical adventure,” the novel features three talented rebels—the author, the illustrator, and the publisher—who defend independent, nonconformist thinking against an Orwellian war against the written word by way of superfetatious prose, sci-fi/occult tropes, Pynchonesque/Wallacian erudition, psychedelic excursions, and postmodern pyrotechnics. Going to absurdist lengths to dramatize the liberating effects of creative thought, the novel also demonstrates the power of the right book arriving at the right time to change one’s life. Recommended if you like Burroughs’s Sixties novels, Brossard’s freak-show epics, Robert Anton Wilson’s trilogies, and/or Mark Leyner’s fiction.”

–Steven Moore