The year is 1985, and twenty-two-year-old Galen lives
with his emotionally dependent mother in a secluded old house surrounded by a walnut orchard in a suburb of Sacramento. He doesn't know who his
father is, his abusive grandfather is dead, and his grandmother, losing
her memory, has been shipped off to a nursing home. Galen and his mother survive on the family's trust fund — old money that his aunt, Helen, and
seventeen-year-old cousin, Jennifer, are determined to get their hands
on.
Galen, a New Age believer who considers himself an old soul,
yearns for transformation: to free himself from the corporeal, to be as
weightless as air, to walk on water. But he's powerless to stop the
manic binges that overtake him, leading him to fixate on forbidden
desires. A prisoner of his body, he is obsessed with thoughts of the
boldly flirtatious Jennifer and dreams of shedding himself of the
clinging mother whose fears and needs weigh him down.
When the
family takes a trip to an old cabin in the Sierras, near South Lake
Tahoe, tensions crescendo. Caught in a compromising position, Galen will discover the shocking truth of just how far he will go to attain the
transcendence he craves.
An exhilarating portrayal of a legacy of violence and madness, Dirt is an entirely feverish read.
