Valley of Day-Glo.

Douglas Barbour is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.
He is the author of Lyric/anti-lyric : Essays on Contemporary Poetry,
Breath Takes, and Fragmenting Body Etc.

DiChario has been touted as a “warped” satiric SF writer with a witty and wicked sense of the absurd. That’s certainly the case in this, a post-holocaust novel in which the only survivors are the “Indians,” whose red skin protects them from the environmental devastations that turned the world (or at least North America) into a desert.

These Indians still pay attention to the white world of the Honio’o—the Seneca Iroquois want to destroy all vestiges of it, while the other tribes scavenge its wonders, and name themselves after its famous films. Thus, in the first page, the narrator, Broadway Danny Rose, tells us how his “Mother Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? killed Father The Outlaw Josey Wales.” Danny is a well-known “asexual” boy who continually berates himself for his lack of manly courage, but who nevertheless survives the various violent adventures into which he falls as he sets out, with his mother and dead father, on a quest to find the fabled Valley of Day-Glo, which does exist and turns out to be a technological marvel that might someday help bring the world back to life.

There is much to like about Valley of Day-Glo, not least the absurd yet wholly human inhabitants of its world, and the darker back story of how that world came to be. I enjoyed its absurdist picaresque protagonist’s adventures, and his slowly growing understanding of his world. It’s an entertaining novel but not, finally, a compelling one. Still, readers seeking something completely different will certainly find it here.