Jangala: A Wild Place in the Heart

Brilliant, native-American protest poet, Kore, follows her egocentric lover to Vegas where he holds blockbuster-writing seminars in a glitzy hotel on the "Strip". The voyeuristic Carlton improvises a lover's quarrel in his workshop, choosing Kore and Nev, the brooding class pariah, secretly back from Vietnam, to roleplay. When the antiwar activist, pampered by her rich, white parents, angers the down-and-out Nev, the skit erupts in violence, and Carlton bans the two from class. Kore heads for the mountains with Nev where he lives in abandoned mining caves and stashes stolen ammo to blow up the government that sent him to Nam. The tough, in-your-face Kore and the vet, haunted by the death of a woman he loved, face each other alone in the wilderness where their conflicting needs explode into a nightmarish battle, and Kore must choose between the barren, rocky road of love for the sorrowing Nev or the easy life with Carlton in return for slavish idolatry.

A dark, gritty memoir-like novel, both a psychological thriller and a powerful love story, told with rare honesty in riveting prose, confronts the huge emotional cost of today's guerrilla warfare on the young men and women thrust into its hit-and-run horror.