"Things are not as they appear. Nor are they otherwise."
From the Lakavatra Sutra (The epigraph to The Drop Edge of Yonder)

About three months ago my cyber self came across the Ashtanga Yoga inspired and spiritually genuine musings of Spiros Antonopoulos at SoulJerky.com. As a site whose well-earned no BS take on yoga and all things Eastern came as a breath of fresh air, I quickly made it one of the few haunts on my weekly Web wanderings. Happily, while browsing the site I was hipped to Rudolph Wurlitzer’s latest novel The Drop Edge of Yonder.

Earning its place as the third novel I have read in eight years (I’m a non-fiction guy), The Drop Edge of Yonder easily coaxed me into its Naked Lunch-esque world of Meursault-like (of Camuss’ The Stranger) indifference and brujo koans. An affront to both the stereotypical Western, as well as the post-One Hundred Years of Solitude magical realism crowd, The Drop Edge of Yonder dares the reader to rest comparisons on adjectives like “surreal” and “edgy.” No descriptions hold when describing this book. As such, it comes as no surprise when a woman named Not Here Not There stumbles frozen and half dead into Zebulon’s commandeered cabin. When you inhale more Gold Rush-era oxygen than you’re used to, what else does the world become but the backdrop for stray bullets grazing witches in a Bacchanalian saloon?

But comparisons are sometimes inevitable, and it’s ironic to find so many telling similarities to Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 film Dead Man. What’s ironic is that after humming Neil Young’s beautifully sparse soundtrack to the film while reading the entire book I learned that Dead Man was in fact heavily inspired by the original manifestation of The Drop Edge of Yonder—a 1970s screenplay titled Zebulon that never was.

Learning this little factoid proved to be a small but settling affair that eased my confusion as to why I could not get Johnny Depp’s face out of my head page after page. But unlike relatively safe “Ah ha!” moments one might have in the Obama Age of change and possibility, in The Drop Edge of Yonder where just the scent of your reputation can get you strung up, “moments of clarity” have none of the uplifting effects Hollywood commonly associates with them. In fact, realizations do just the opposite—they drop you face first in a muddy ditch lying next to an unlucky man with a hole in his head. These are the teachings of crazy wisdom gone mad! And here, spiritual lessons have more to do with trusting a lunatic jail mate bust you out of the clink than finding a peaceful tree to meditate under.

And that seems to be the point. Rudolph Wurlitzer, a practicing Buddhist, came of age in the late Sixties literary world of just-post-Beat, where American Buddhism was having a nice rebellious ride across the plains. The West became the East, was the East, and it was not long before Buddhism struck gold in towns like Boulder and Red Feather Lakes, Colorado. However, despite that Richard Gere allegedly noted way back when that the original screenplay this book later grew out of contained all four Noble Truths, The Drop Edge of Yonder is not a book about Buddhism with a six-shooter edge to it. The Drop Edge of Yonder is dirty earth. It’s nineteent century uneasiness with exotic foreigners. It’s shoot a prostitute for lewdness. It’s Manifest Destiny gone insane (as if it could have gone any other way). And as a novel, The Drop Edge of Yonder is a gem. It’s independent, spiritually grounded (deep in the dirt), and about as “If you see the Buddha walking down the road, kill him” as you can get. Enjoy!