Jesus Coyote [Paperback]

Harold Jaffe (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 8, 2008

Building on the mayhem generated by the controversial but critically acclaimed 15 Serial Killers, Jesus Coyote goes still further. Jaffe's "docufictional" novel based on the Manson murders proves that, like Manson's coyote totem, the myths around him continue to vibrate. In one sweeping panoramic arc, with the brutal murders at its center, Jaffe captures the perspective of Manson, his devotees, the prosecutors, the victims and their mourners-while exploding the sanctimony of institutionalized morality.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

...intellectually daring and unflinchingly honest look into this revealing and recent chapter of American cultural/criminal history. -- Doug Lain, author Last Week's Apocalypse

...the novel is a shocking and sensitive second-look at Manson-the-myth, told through conflicting points-of-view, at once positioning him as mystic-savior, molestation-victim and psychopath. -- Matthew Irwin

Harold Jaffe, celebrated enemy of convenient mythologies, has re-invented Charles Manson and his 'family' through a brilliantly calculated decomposition of cultural images and historical narratives. What finally emerges is an elegantly carnivalesque narrative headlining Jesus Coyote and his tribe of acolytes. Not surprising to those familiar with his previous books, Jaffe's virtuosic novel manages to be both a richly entertaining read and a penetrating interrogation of official versions of cultural history. -- Stephen-Paul Martin

Unlike the average novel, Jaffe's docufiction style provides witness testimonies, phone transcripts, interrogations, and press conferences. The violence is bloody and brutal; the author's voice is solid and smooth, reeling in the reader and keeping their eyes focused and their fingers turning the pages. -- Midwest Book Review --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

About the Author

Harold Jaffe is the author of author of ten fiction or creative nonfiction volumes and four novels, including Jesus Coyote, (2008) 15 Serial Killers (2003) and Terror-Dot-Gov (2005) from RDSP, Beyond the Techno-Cave: A Guerrilla Writer's Guide to Post-Millennial Culture, (2007) False Positive, (2002), Sex for the Millennium (1999), Othello Blues (1996), Straight Razor (1995), Eros Anti-Eros (1990), Madonna and Other Spectacles (1988) and Beasts (1986). Jaffe's fiction has appeared in numerous journals and has been widely anthologized. His novels and stories have been translated into German, Japanese, Spanish, French, and Czech. Jaffe is editor-in-chief of Fiction International and Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at San Diego State. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 152 pages
• Publisher: Raw Dog Screaming Press (May 8, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1933293632
• ISBN-13: 978-1933293639
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,129,488 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Harold Jaffe is the author of 15 volumes of fiction, docufiction, and non-fiction. His work has been widely anthologized and translated, most recently into French, Spanish, Japanese, Turkish, and Farsi. Jaffe is editor-in-chief of Fiction International.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Informative and Provocative, May 9, 2008

By 

Kuemmel (North America) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jesus Coyote (Hardcover)

Harold Jaffe has emerged as the most critically important writer of our time. In the midst of a publishing world full of commercial texts littered with clichéd romance and crime drama; a literary world infected with mass-produced, politically correct "workshop" fiction; and a journalistic world plagued by false "non-fiction" accounts sold by charlatans and purchased by acquiescent conglomerates, Harold Jaffe' work--fiction and "docu-fiction"--offers acute societal insights in the context of innovative, highly energized fictive and literary structures, epistemological investigations, and compelling character portraits.

These are the characteristics which define Jaffe's latest work, JESUS COYOTE, an incisive investigation and portrait of events, characters, social dynamics, and motivations surrounding Charles Manson and his followers. Notably, JESUS COYOTE, refers to actual individuals only obliquely, by action and tangential reference, renaming those individuals involved. Additionally, in the text timelines are inverted and/or conflated to emphasize societal connections. However, it is clear that the motivations for these literary choices have nothing to do with concerns of legalistic accuracy or limitations of artistic license regarding public figures, but rather these literary choices function tropologically to expand the presentation of characters and events such that they can be examined within their larger social contexts, in addition to being viewed individually. This scrupulous literary process enables a macroscopic overview and provides an organic unity to the ostensibly nonsensical acts of Manson and his followers, and presents their subculture as an outgrowth of the facades and failures of dominant society, as opposed to an individualized societal or psychological aberration.

JESUS COYOTE has a bifurcated form. The initial sections of the text provide a series of communications, via telephone, media, office memoranda, and personal conversations, among various characters which, taken together, comprise an outline of a myriad of social forces. The next sections of the text provide personal statements of various characters, forming intimate psychoanalytical portraits which exist both autonomously and in relation to the social dynamics set forth in the first sections of the text. This combination offers an examination of "reality" in its completed form: an ever-fluctuating relationship between reality proffered by social, institutional, and political forces as a societal exoskeleton-- juxtaposed and conjoined with individuated perceptions. In a larger sense, this combination is in fact a representation of the tension between collective consciousness and self-perception.

The result of this polarized representation is to generate systematic social investigations, particularly as they concern institutional and commercial dysfunctions. The prison system, both juvenile and adult, is delineated as the primary producer of Jesus Coyote, and the de-facto creator of his power as both a misfit and master of society at large. Throughout this society at large, potent capitalist strains lead to the commodification of all aspects of human behavior: police "operatives" sell their information, psychics provide no guidance and betray their patrons for material gain, media sources forsake the Jeffersonian "need to know" for titillating headlines at the expense of accuracy--fully aware that in a repressed and commodified society, consumers are hungry for grisly and lusty details to enable vicarious experiences.

Such media sales dynamics are inexorably linked with the ever-present, quasi-Puritanical desire of institutions and government to control sexuality and utilize the inherent repression of that control to fuel consumerism and materialism. As Coyote acolyte "Hedda" explains from prison, merging broad socialist orientations with a 60's free-love agenda: "In America..., the body is seen as private property, another kind of capital. With us, the body was communal property..." As if to provide an excuse for readers' lurid fascination with sex and violence, the dominant society depicted in JESUS COYOTE engages in a never-ending attempt to blame all aspects of counter-culture behavior on drugs as a shield to cover any inherent dissatisfaction with that dominant culture itself.

Jaffe's literary form in JESUS COYOTE allows the expansion of subject matter beyond the original Manson-related events and personalities, without minimizing the importance and intrigue of individual personalities. Broad concepts such as ecology and free will are explored in statements by Coyote-followers Hedda and LuAnn during an illegal interrogation:

Hedda: How much will does a leopard in a cage have?
LuAnn: How much will does a homeless person have? ...
Hedda: How much will does a polluted birch tree have? More than you can imagine.

And as America-centered as JESUS COYOTE is, transcontinental social commentary is evident nonetheless, as in veiled criticism of a European filmmaker's careerism and egocentricity, even in the face of his young wife and child's brutal murders. Yet French and American preferences in media stimuli are differentiated, as are artistic and bourgeois perceptions of events. Reporting the murders, American headlines immediately highlight drug-use as the cause of events, while French media emphasize orgying and sexual mutilation. And while bourgeois American readers avidly consume specific details of the crimes, self-proclaimed European artistic-geniuses and cognoscenti eschew the banality of those same details. Upon close inspection, it is clear that these very assertions of banality are in fact attempts at self-inflation and self-congratulation.

The character investigations in JESUS COYOTE are both generalized and specific. The precise nature of Coyote's manipulative power and imagination is exposed, including the content of his linguistic guises, which simultaneously invert stereotypes and merge polarities--Jesus as Satan, Beauty in Death, etc. And always, death itself exists simultaneously as threat and premonition. Coyote harnesses the power of sexuality by preaching a "free love" which is by no means free, but has its own tithes, purveyances, and instantiated rituals. Yet Coyote's power is seen to be more than merely psychological and manipulative. He embodies a certain spiritual connection and enables a form of peace and belonging which his young followers find irresistible, and irresistibly satisfying. Moreover, the connection with the natural world that Coyote professes seems, in part, to be actual and documented. At the point in the text when Coyote, sleeping outside with his young lover, is apprehended, the police report: "The peculiar thing is that [their] sleeping bag was surrounded by a pack of coyotes that growled at us but then fled." The implcation is that Coyote had in fact summoned his animal brethren for protection.

In JESUS COYOTE, Harold Jaffe has once again created a text which is both extremely significant from a literary point of view, and intensely incisive from a sociological standpoint. The text is simultaneously informative and provocative, entertaining and cautionary. It is this multi-leveled nexus of forces, conscious and unconscious, which the genius of JESUS COYOTE conveys.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars No Mean Feet, May 13, 2008

By 

Stephen Martin "Stephen-Paul Martin" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Jesus Coyote (Hardcover)

The multiple voicings, the clean prose, the ongoing play of ambiguities and transparencies all add up to make Harold Jaffe's Jesus Coyote a very smooth book. We expect it to be disturbing of course. No surprise there. What catches us off-guard is how engaging it all is, how easily it goes down. I recently watched a Manson documentary, and was surprised at how trite and dull the behavior of Mansion and his women seems now, almost 40 years later. Jaffe has taken what at this point looks like played out subject matter and made it work as literature. No mean feat.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Trick the Man, April 27, 2008

By 

Maya Yin "Maya Yin" (Chaing Mai, Thailand) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jesus Coyote (Hardcover)

Jaffe continues and extends his 'docufictional' exploration of
'deviance' in his latest novel, "Jesus Coyote," based on the Manson Family murders. With elegant style, Jaffe illuminates that strange moment in history where media coverage of Charles Manson and his counter-culture band of "Family" members held America hostage with the notorious Tate/LaBianca murders. Philosophically revolutionary, Jaffe analyzes the subject matter in a Rashoman like format featuring the viewpoint of participants and victims alike.
As the author so deftly reveals, Revolution is the intent; a revolution of consciousness where Manson is societies' scapegoat and the media driven capitalists the antagonists. Intelligent readers will see the subtle point of how the media circus uses the murders as a means to deflect public attention as far away as possible from the US government approved mass murders in Viet Nam.
These string of "docufictions" continue where "15 Serial Killers" leaves off. Much like "Kissinger," which points out that killing, if it is carried out by Navy Seals or Blackwater mercenaries is "necessary" and "heroic." Here, Jaffe exposes the embedded hypocrisy in each of these strategically architected stories. The result is a carefully crafted tapestry of graphic elegance that is complexly combined with a new revolutionary consciousness. The skill with which the author handles such serious subject matter resonates with his razor-sharp wit and high-beamed laser critique aimed directly at the target.