1 cup Dancing Wu Li Masters
1 cup Jacob’s Ladder
½ cup Hyperspace
¼ cup The Five People You Meet in Heaven
¼ cup Stand By Me
1 tsp Angels in America
Pinch of Jean Paul Sartre to taste

Puree ingredients and bake at 350°F for an hour until firm. Remove from oven and sprinkle with cultural icons and fresh satire. Serve warm, with a side of irony. Delicious!

Cameron Smith, the chronic high school underachiever, resorts to smoking pot to numb the pain of living in his dysfunctional family. Not long after his humiliating firing from the Buddha Burger (no, it’s not vegetarian), he discovers that he has Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) variant – commonly known as Mad Cow Disease. There is no cure and the disease has a 100% mortality rate. An angel convinces him that if he can just find Dr. X, he can both save the universe and be cured. He goes on a road trip with a hypochondriac dwarf, a punk angel, and a yard gnome who claims to be the Norse god Balder. Or does he? Is it a dream? An alternate reality stream? Is he really going to save the world, or like Don Quixote, is he just tilting at windmills? This is a surreal story about life, death, and finding what really matters. As always, Ms. Bray’s word-smithery is superlative and her characters are fresh and vivid. If you’re going to read this book (and I highly recommend it), prepare to laugh, cry, and think.