This excerpt from A RAFT MANIFEST is reprinted courtesy of Calamari Archive

In the wake of THE BECOMING (book 1 of the WEST OF KINGDOM COME
quadrilogy), the 2 feral brothers Rem + Rom “beecomb” self-aware of their
current condition (fathered by a rogue member of the Lewis + Clark
expedition and reared by a she-wolf) and build a raft to “riverse
ingeneer” their father’s route that spit them out at the mouth of the
Columbia, in the name of westward expansion. To document their journey,
they need to invent their own “landgauge” derived in part from chinook
jargon, spanish, pirate + backwoods “pigeon” english (imparted from a
“courier” pigeon’s “messyeggs”) and a “wriding” system cannibalized from
books they inherit from their father: his half-literate journals,
Huckleberry Finn, Finnegans Wake + the Discovery doctrine of manifest
destiny—a written language that also marries “spit + image” w/ text, down
to “customb” typefaces. “Reel” time/world stories eventually “devilip” in
parallel as Rem + Rom take turns “scooby” diving into the floodwaters
below the raft and pipe up the feed (akin to a dream “journel”), though
the “hystoria” inevitably mirrors the wriding of A RAFT MANIFEST, or “Huck
Finnegans Wake,” if you will.

CONTINUE READING — OPENS PDF FILE

Rem + Rom currently ride A RAFT MANIFEST (forthcoming from Calamari Archive in 2017). Before this they came born in the riding of THE BECOMING (2013), though they don’t know this yet.