Beneath the Coyote Hills

Beneath The Coyote Hills explores the influence of choice and chance in our lives. Do we control our own destiny or is it dictated in part by mysterious forces beyond our control? Tommy Aristophanos is a luckless man, homeless freegan, fiction writer, and epileptic, who is haunted by grotesque "spell visions" and by his abusive father who returns, quite literally, from the dead. When Tommy's fictional creation, wealthy and successful V.C. Hoffstatter, emerges from the pages of Tommy's novel to harass him, plucky Tommy has to fight back. Hoffstatter believes that we author our own destiny, while Tommy's many reverses and ailment teach him that we control far less than we imagine. In the book's final narrative twist, we are left wondering who is the true Pygmalion-Tommy or Hoffstatter?