Sun Eye Moon Eye, a finalist for the Big Other Readers' Choice Award, centers around Logan Blackfeather, a musician of mixed Hopi descent, whose faulty sense of direction sends him spiraling through the mid-’80s.
The novel opens with Logan crossing a stretch of Arizona desert, his thumb out for a ride and most of what he owns in a bag slung over a shoulder. By this time he has suffered a breakdown and given up music. A knife fight in the parking lot of a roadside bar ends in the death of a trucker, and in short order Logan finds himself in a psychiatric hospital in New York.
He makes his way to Manhattan, where he’s as bewildered by the fluorescent-colored spikes of punks as he is by the upturned collars of yuppies. A job as a piano man in a Village bar eases him back into music, and he falls into a turbulent relationship with a successful ad executive.
Haunted by a dead father who comes to him in dreams, by the killing of the trucker, and memories of his violent uncle/stepfather, Logan is caught between tradition and modernity, the rural and the urban, his Anglo and Native American ancestries.
Myth and dream play key roles in reconstructing Logan’s worldview, and he begins to suspect that empirical reality is as open to interpretation as the dream world.
“Sun Eye Moon Eye engages and entertains, alternating rhapsodic, almost-hallucinogenic language with clean prose that grounds the reader and clarifies the action. [...] an important contribution to literature’s compendium of significant works.”
—Anne Welsbacher,
writing for Indie Reader“Sun Eye Moon Eye is a violent, magical ride that transports us to the human psyche’s farthest corners and warps reality and the dreamworld so that the two are inseparable.”
— Heavy Feather Review“It’s an astonishing denouement, the narrative melting away, until we’re left in another kind of desert, populated by phantoms, by tricksters, by the dead, where language is mere symbols smeared on a crumbling wall, and the fallen arches of Ozymandias are consumed by sands …This book was worth the wait. In gold.”
— John Patrick Higgins,
writing for Exacting Clam“The experience of reading the book, pondering its mysteries and savoring its power, feels timeless.”
— The Arts Fuse“Captivating ... a lyrical masterpiece.”
— Seattle Book Review“The novel … [pulls] us irresistibly into a story whose characters are sympathetic and vividly drawn, whose writing lyrically evokes Logan’s dreams and nightmares—whether along the abandoned highways and landscapes and habitations of the southwest or the grimy corners of Manhattan—and whose hallucinatory perspective never loses sight of the world as it is. That the novel dwells in this rich cross-current—intersections of spirit, politics, history—without losing sight of Logan’s humanity, and our interest in his fate, is the finest achievement of this visionary novel.”
— Tamas Dobozy,
writing for Vol. 1 Brooklyn“Readers and libraries seeking powerful descriptive language, a stark contrast between past and present worlds, and influences that drive a fallen character to envision new beginnings ... will relish the atmospheric, evocative sentences.”
— Midwest Book Review “Compelling … reading the book felt like reading a dream.”
— Portland Book Review