Walter Van Brunt likes nothing better than to fly along on his motorbike, invincible and immortal. But one day, dodging a mysterious shadow on the road, he crashes into a barrier and loses his right foot. Walter is a descendant of Dutch yeomen and since the day of the accident he has been haunted by their ghosts.

Features the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveller and mystic, the living epitome of Beat.

Tyrone O'Shaugnessy Tierwater, suburban drudge, is manager of an antiquated shopping centre in New York. His life is changed dramatically by his marriage to Andrea, a well-known environmental activist. Flashing forward to 2025, Tyrone is now manager of a pop star's private animal menagerie.

Vineland, a zone of blessed anarchy in northern California, is the last refuge of hippiedom, a culture devastated by the sobriety epidemic, Reaganomics, and the Tube. Here, in an Orwellian 1984, Zoyd Wheeler and his daughter Prairie search for Prairie's long-lost mother, a Sixties radical who ran off with a narc.

Examines the lives of the Cambridge spies, and in particular Anthony Blunt. The story is told by Blunt, in the form of a journal which starts on the first day of the new life . The author uses the secret life as a way to explore the darker realms of the 20th century and its hidden minds.

In these stories, the author renders the bizarre normal and the absurd hilarious, from the eerily real , almost holographic evocations of historical figures, to overtelevised game-show hosts and late-night comedians. In the title story, punk nihilism meets Young Republicanism.