The Sacred Clown’s Modern West Trilogy, by Rick Voorhees
The motif
The gods have never been subtle, and neither is the truth.
The sacred clown does everything in reverse, laughs where others bow, and tells the truth nobody else will say out loud. This book works the same way. It mocks what passes for sacred so you can see what actually is.
A self-aware narrator breaks the fourth wall, Odin and the old Plains powers trade notes on the living, and history gets told the way the people who lived it remember it.
Three stories, one volume
Inside the book
Part One
Rez Ball Gods
Elbowoods, 1942. The best team North Dakota ever saw plays by the rules and loses the trophy to a team that didn’t. Sixty years, one flooded homeland, and a pair of half brothers later, the trophy comes home.
Part Two
Sitting Bull’s Mutual Funds
Sitting Bull dies with his integrity intact, betrayed by Buffalo Bill and Major McLaughlin. A century later, a council member chasing the chief’s supposed five-billion-dollar portfolio meets his Waterloo.
Part Three
The Pecos Poet
A dharma bum sells “Free Poetry for Texans” on the Santa Fe Plaza, wins a Texas election, and loses it all when his name turns out to be Buddah, not Bubba.
“I spent five decades chasing the Ghost Dance across two continents — through the Amazon’s uncontacted tribes, through the cloud forests of Oaxaca, back to the Sicangu Lakota on Rosebud, where I helped to bring the true buffalo back home. I know what it is to carry sacred history into a world bent on erasing it. The Sacred Clown’s Modern West Trilogy carries that same weight, but it dares to laugh while doing it. That laughter is its own kind of medicine. Voorhees writes with the same instinct I’ve spent my life chasing: the old stories never actually left, they just found new machinery to haunt — the internet, the multiverse, the news cycle. This book knows exactly where those ghosts went.”
The Imagist
The West, seen backward
Infrared turns summer trees white and skies strange. It is the clown’s eye in a camera: everything reversed, and somehow truer.
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