EASTER SUNDAY, 1973: Just before dawn in Kingsburg, California, six-year-old Gordon Swannson, asthmatic boy genius, gets his ass kicked by a spectral Easter Bunny--an event that sends his already hyperactive imagination spiraling toward paranoia. Gordon becomes convinced that ghosts and other weird entities inhabit a daimonic reality that can interact with our everyday world. He starts seeing mystery and danger everywhere in his isolated farming community. He even thinks his best friend, Jimmy, might be possessed by demons.... JUNE 7th, 1979: Reality catches up with Gordon's worst imaginings on the day after his thirteenth birthday, when his father dies by crashing a Cessna into the living room of their house. Gordon sets out to discover whether the plane crash was an accident or something far more sinister. Before he finds the answer, he'll experience puberty, Pink Floyd, trout fishing, lesbian vampire movies, and midnight cliff-diving with the Hells Angels--all while learning to cope with the trauma-induced narcolepsy that inspires his nickname, Crash Gordon.... HALLOWEEN, 1982: Gordon meets Jimmy's Uncle Lloyd, an obscenely rich insurance broker to the rocket industry who makes Woodward and Bernstein's Deep Throat look like a low-level bureaucrat. With Lloyd acting as their demented mentor, Gordon and his friends embark on a road trip to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. Along the way, Lloyd lectures them about such diverse topics as hypnotism, assassination theories, MKULTRA, COINTELPRO, and the kidnapping of Patty Hearst; serial killers, satanic sacrifices, interdimensional energy portals, and the remote viewing program at the Stanford Research Institute; shamanism, ayahuasca, Terence McKenna's tryptamine-fueled encounters with the Logos, and the role "future causality" plays in the world's current fate. And that's only a prelude to Lloyd's startling explanation of how Gordon and Jimmy have become unwitting participants in a CIA mind control experiment known as Project MONARCH....