All Experience Is An Arch

About the Book

Answering a request by a devoted follower of Jesse Carpenter, who is known as The Pilgrim, Luke Scribner sets out on a trip from the Santa Ynez Valley in California to Joplin, Missouri, with his young friend Jack Cramer, who is using the trip to write his memoirs. Along the way, Luke meets a number of strangers who tell him stories of atrocities and strange occurrences, while Jack struggles to write about his life in Alaska with an Aleut girl, who will compete in The Great Alaskan Sled Race, and a tall Aleut man who tells him a legend about a Golden Madonna.

On their way back to California with a runaway teenage girl, a tall boy whom she has asked to accompany her, and a mysterious but beautiful woman who is part Indian, they experience a natural calamity and meet an angry sheriff and two suspicious detectives who are searching for some stolen money. In an attempt to evade these three in trying to reach Los Inocentes, their destination, they begin to uncover many things about each other.

However, when they finally reach California, all hell breaks loose.

About the Author

Having retired after forty-two years of teaching and writing academic documents of all kinds, for the last seven years Den is Huckaby has turned to fiction, his first love, but only because of the patient approval of his wife Donna and the fact that their four children are now about their own lives. A product of a rigid mother as well as stern Catholic nuns in grammar school and pragmatic Jesuit priests in college, he has just begun to learn how to relax by hacking away on the golf course and spending time with his wife and his handicapped son whom he calls “Bucky.”