Published

Meet the oddly irresistible Orlan Doe. He doesn’t have a home. He doesn’t have a family. He doesn’t even have a real name. But what he does have is a heart. An enormous heart that’s much too big for his scrawny, 120-pounds soaking wet body. A heart so big that it will eventually win over an obstinate and opinionated free spirit named Frankie who happens upon him while driving Route 66 in her Good Times Van. With every quirky stop, the unlikely pair further deepen the kind of close friendship that Orlan has always longed for. And by the end of the route, his great big, enormous heart will finally find a home.

Vincent Hérbert is a successful author of a series of books that follow the adventures of Buddy and Theo, an unwitting pair of traveling encyclopedia salesmen, and their accidental but uncanny encounters with area folklore such as Diana of the Dunes, the Pope Lick Monster and the Wendigo cannibals. Despite the fact that Vince was raised in “the place where myth and legend are inseparable from everyday life”, he has thus far avoided imaginatively revisiting Louisiana with his fictional protagonists. Neither has he returned home with his wife Anna and their three young children in large part because of a particular monster that he has never forgotten from his past. Eventually his agent Lydia, because of the marketing potential she recognizes, and Anna, because she senses the presence of a secret ghost that is causing her husband to drift farther away from his family…

What if the things that we do and don’t do really matter? What if there really is a purpose to our lives? What if there really is someone or something out there, up there? Lionel Elijah Buckner Jr. is comfortable if not completely satisfied with a life consumed by unapologetic self-indulgence. After all, he was the one who survived the challenges of his mixed race upbringing in the deep-south. He was the one who had the courage to move away to New York City and start anew. He was the one responsible for transforming his crude interest in art into a recently uninspired career as an abstract painter. It was remarkable just how much his life had changed since he had assumed complete control over it. But then out of the blue, he receives a call which ever so subtly alters his…