Customer Reviews

Looking for Bigfoot: A New Novel for America

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There is a small, but growing, number of Americans who know
something has gone terribly wrong with our government. They
know that for decades our government has covertly been involved
in election rigging, political assassinations, drug smuggling, and
the training and sponsoring of terrorists. They also know George
W. Bush was never elected, 9-11 was an inside job, and our current
occupation of the middle east is not about spreading democracy.

In short, these people know they are being lied to and they want
the truth. Jack Robert King is one of these people.

In Mike Palecek's latest book, "Looking for Bigfoot", Jack King is
the renegade host of an internet show, 'Bigfoot Radio"; Bigfoot being
a metaphor for all the dark conspiracy myths surrounding our
country that, despite the evidence, are just too frightening to
believe.

Broadcasting from his family home in Iowa, King delivers a daily
rant on the sad state of modern America, delving into controversial
topics with a brilliant mix of sarcastic wit and shocking honesty
that would never be allowed on any mainstream media. Who killed
JFK, RFK, and MLK? What really happened at Waco, Okalahoma City,
and Ruby Ridge? Is America the beacon of freedom or the new
imperial threat to the world?

King understands the peril of his position; most people would
want to shut him up because they consider his opinion paranoid and
unpatriotic, while others would want to shut him up because what
he is saying is true. Yet he continues his show even if it makes him
feel alienated from his country, his community, and even his family.

Then King mysteriously receives a magazine featuring a story
about his childhood mentor who has gone missing in an Oregon
forest while looking for the illusive Bigfoot himself. He decides to
risk his marriage and his sanity by taking a bus trip west on a quest
to find his lost friend and the answers to America's darkest secrets.
Throughout the book you get a sense that author Mike Palecek has
modeled Jack King's character after his own life experiences and
uses King to vent his own frustration at the world from the pages
of a fictional book.

Indeed the novel itself is kind of like Palecek's own "Bigfoot"
broadcast as he tries to reach out to an uninformed public and
demonstrate that behind every outrageous conspiracy theory sits
an ugly nugget of truth that will not just go away if ignored.

Palecek is a sick puppy, and proud of it. His world view is a little more paranoid than some schizophrenics, but hell, mental health isn't a requirement for storytellers. And, hey, maybe Palecek is the sane one and the rest of us are insane lemmings. As I read "Bigfoot" I had to keep reminding myself not to confuse authors with their protagonists, but Palecek has been fairly blunt about certain political qualities he shares with his protag, Jack Robert King, who happens (unlike Palecek, one hopes) to be an unsettled, unemployed, unbalanced hyper-liberal screwball-misfit who does little more than rant into the ether about on his Internet radio program.

His topics? The usual: Stolen elections, the obvious conspiracies to kill Kennedy and King, the Roswell cover-up, the Conservative Media ... blah blah blah. But he also puts forward the theory that the WTC attack was a U.S. government conspiracy, and the assassination of liberal Sen. Paul Wellstone in a contrived plane crash. Freaky stuff.

The story finally turns interesting when King hits the road from his Iowa home (at the Field of Dreams movie set) to the wilderness of Oregon, where his quest is to find an old baseball coach and learn the truth about Bigfoot. OK, still a little freaky.

But suddenly here's this freak Jack King in a classic hero's journey, rubbing up against stranger beings than Cyclops and Lotus-eaters on a never-ending bus trip. Whether by accident or shrewd planning, Palecek has contrived a smart story. Not perfect, not always palatable, not even remotely convincing in its politics, but away from the didactics ... pretty smart.

Don't pick up "Bigfoot" unless you think George W. Bush is the Anti-Christ and Dick Cheney framed Fatty Arbuckle. It's not worth busting a vein. But if you want to see what bubbles around in the heads of the Far, Far, Far Left, check it out.

I've never seen Bigfoot, or a UFO. I did see a big city in the sky once, hanging upside down from the bottom of a rain cloud. Remembering that makes me believe that anything is possible.

This is an entertaining book, written by a man who has spent time in jail for acts of civil disobedience against the United States military. The main character is Jack Robert King, a social malcontent with an Internet radio show. His emphasis is on all of the crimes, real and alleged, that have been committed by the U. S. federal government over the last 60 years. Conspiracies abound, Jack sees adversaries everywhere, and eventually he takes a bus to the American Northwest, looking for the famed Bigfoot. As he suspects, FBI agents are tracking him and at the end, they kill Jack and his family.
From the text, it is clear that Palecek is a man angry with the government and has been a frustrated writer for some time. That anger has not abated and motivates his writing style, but his frustrations should have been eased by the completion of this book. It moves well, and as a native Iowan, I could relate to his references to locations and events in Iowa. He makes several references to the movie, "Field of Dreams", which was made in Dyersville, Iowa. One of the greatest thrills in my life was batting on that field and coming within a few feet of knocking one into the corn. If you like baseball, then a trip to that field is tantamount to a religious pilgrimage.
While the conspiracies sometimes go way over the line towards absurdity, I enjoyed this book. Sometimes I couldn't decide whether the author was serious or being sarcastic. That is probably a good thing, because it made me think more as I read it.

Mike Palecek has written before about small-town Iowa, about the people of America, about truth, corruption and lies. He has written about brave individuals who are driven to make a difference. He has created characters who work within a system they hate, who later step outside that system and find doors everywhere are slammed in their faces.

The Last Liberal Outlaw featured newspaper editor Tom Blue, who fought to halt the construction of a prison in his rural home town of Liberal, Iowa. Joe Coffee's Revolution had Joe speaking out against prisons and the military. Twins portrayed a revolutionary priest pitted in lifelong conflict against his brother, a prison warden. In The Truth postman Pete Penny delivers the mail and observes life, all the while trying to figure out who is really responsible for his son's death in Iraq. Each character is unique, yet each has many common characteristics just as each of Palecek's books share both theme and style.

Palecek ties everything together in his latest novel, Looking for Bigfoot, the book I consider to be his best thus far.

Jack Robert King lives in the Dyersville, Iowa home that was used for the movie Field of Dreams. He's a stay-at-home dad whose wife is the principal of the local school. Jack has written for and edited newspapers, but he tired of the censorship. He's worked at the county home but there he tired of the hypocrisy; why argue whether someone who can no longer tell the difference should get wheat or rye bread, while thousands of miles away Americans are killing innocent people who live in Iraq?

Jack is a writer, although he hasn't exactly decided on the topic for the great novel he's been writing for several years. Jack is fighting for America, and he is fighting America. Jack is searching for the truth; he shares what he sees and what he feels with those who read or listen to him. He is "Looking for Bigfoot" and he wants us to look with him by way of his Internet radio show. It's an LFZ (lie free zone) where cover-ups are not allowed.

Years ago, Jack was a pretty good high school ballplayer -- his team lost in the semi's at state -- but his coach left and he never played again. He still remembers that coach, Larry Moore, who was more like a father to him than his biological dad. It's startling when Jack finds a copy of Oregon Magazine in his mailbox, with Larry Moore bigger than life right on the cover. The incident triggers Jack's search for the coach. Looking for Bigfoot, looking for truth, looking for coach -- the searches are simultaneous, and the boundaries are blurred.

Blended in with all that longing is a healthy -- or unhealthy -- dose of paranoia: They don't want the truth to come out, They don't want us to think, and They only want us to follow Their lead. If They will kill presidents and other leaders, if They will even attack Their Own Country to manipulate the people -- surely They won't even blink if They have to kill off a few dissidents who speak out against Them. Paranoid thinking it surely is, but we've all heard the saying: just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't someone out to get you.

Looking for Bigfoot is about fighting back, it's about making choices. How can we make a difference in the face of incredible corrupt power? Do we use violence or do we avoid violence? Who shall we adopt as hero or role model: John Brown or Mahatma Gandhi? How far are we willing to go in our fight and how far is the other side willing to go? Who will win? Who will survive?

Friends of mine -- good friends, extremely intelligent friends -- have asked me why I read fiction rather than non. "You only have a certain amount of time to read -- why waste it on something other than facts? Why not read truth instead of stories?" I've felt they are missing the point, but I've had trouble responding to these questions. Mike Palecek has provided an answer in the following conversation, excerpted from the book:
"It's fiction, but it ain't .... Fiction isn't a lie"

"Good fiction is real. It comes from the truth. It is the truth."

"It is, actually, a more accurate way of saying the truth than the actual stating of facts. You take something that you know is the truth, but nobody talks about it and you put it down on paper and make it real. It's ... so liberating ... empowering."

"I can say what the reporters are too chicken to."

"Doesn't mean it gets read, though."

If it sounds as though Looking for Bigfoot is yet another Democrat-inspired rant against Republicans, it's not. Both major American political parties are skewered fairly equally here. Americans are the criminals, Palecek seems to be saying, all of us. Yet Americans, all Americans, are the victims, at the same time.

Jack Robert King is trying to stand up and fight back. His family is afraid and angry. The demons from his past often rear their ugly heads, Jack may question his own sanity. Others certainly do, with or without malicious intent. Even the reader may question Jack's sanity at times.

Will Jack Robert King stand up to the pressure? Will he find Bigfoot -- or is the looking more important than the finding? Will Jack survive the search? Will his family survive? Will the USA survive? Will we, the readers, survive this book?

Mike Palecek poses powerful questions. He has constructed a masterpiece in this novel. It deserves to be read. It's exhilarating and terrifying. It's realer than real.

Review originally published in JANUARY MAGAZINE November 2005
Book selected for the JANUARY MAGAZINE BEST OF FICTION 2005

Populist and quasi-libertarian Jack Robert King is an internet radio announcer who is more than bothered by America's slide down the slippery slope to Nazi Germany. For example, before "The Slide" began, every item in a U.S. store that said "Made In China" came from Taiwan - The Republic of China - FREE China! U.S. shoppers never encountered a Communist item in a store - not from Cuba, the Soviet Union, or Red China. Then "The Slide" began. Americans discovered that "Made in China" was Red China! How in Hades that ever happened was beyond many people's powers of comprehension. Meanwhile, politicians continued to insist that China was turning to capitalism despite all the corporatist evidence to the contrary: slave and child labor, persecutions of Christians and Muslims, and military operations in the Strait of Free China. What is this Amerika we are sliding toward? Jack Robert King wants to know.

He watched Adolf Bush steal the election in Florida, governed by his brother Jeb Bush. Then he watched the Twin Towers be attacked and then bombed, protected by Adolf Bush's other brother Marvin Bush. Then he watched Adolf Bush steal the next election in Ohio through outright corruption while fellow Yale Skull-n-Bones Kerry slinked silently away to the disgust of Ohio Democrats and left it to the Libertarians and Greens to file charges. Jack Robert King wants to know what happened to Ohio and what happened to America? He echoes the sentiments of the late Harry Browne who said "I want my country back"! In King's dedication to his wife in his yet-to-be-published novel 'The Complex Apartment', he wrote: "We thought we lived in the best country in the world, and it turned out to be the worst", adding "It's time to start setting our unthinkable thoughts loose in the town square".

So Jack Robert King hatches a plan to search for his former baseball coach who disappeared while searching for Bigfoot. This plan is hatched before the film "V is for Vendetta" came out, and so King has no warning of what to expect. King just knows that he will find no answers in the cornfields of Iowa, while sensing that they are to be found in the mountains of the Pacific northwest. He books a bus trip and carries along his radio show - Bigfoot Radio.

What follows is a very bizarre bus trip, and an uncensored traveling internet radio show. On Bush's theft of the 2000 election, he says: "To these folks, life is about shaping events to suit your wants". About the Afghanistan invasion and occupation, he says: "And then we bombed Afghanistan in the preamble to the long run-up to the slaughter of the children of Iraq". It was interesting to note how King, like so many Americans, used the word "we" when describing the mayhem of "them". It reminds one of the Ayn Rand book "We, the Living" in which the word "I" had ceased to exist and individuals struggled to say "I" love you.

In searching for Bigfoot, King is really searching for the Lost America. But did it ever really exist? Or are we all guilty of mass insanity? King doesn't know what is happening and that is precisely what is happening in this book. In the end, King finds some answers and in a sense arrives where he started, yet in the words of T.S. Eliot: "And know the place for the first time".

Mike Palecek's Looking for Bigfoot is a no-holds-barred onslaught on the state of the America today. Palecek uses Bigfoot as a metaphor for what we tend to believe about America.

Seemingly semi-autobiographical, the novel's protagonist, Jack Robert King, is a former seminarian who served prison time for protesting the U.S. military. He worked for a while on small town newspapers and now is a stay-at-home husband in Dyersville, Iowa, where he and his family live in the farmhouse from the movie Field of Dreams. Jack is convinced Americans spend too much time on banality to realize that the American dream and American history are the product of disinformation created and controlled by men in the shadows. He starts his own streaming radio program on the Internet called "Bigfoot Radio." Bigfoot Radio streams in more than one sense as it is often a stream of political consciousness from "a blue state mind living in a red state universe."

Jack becomes so obsessed with truth versus perception that his home life is falling apart. When a magazine he's never heard of mysteriously arrives in his mailbox with a cover story about the disappearance of his former baseball coach who became a Bigfoot investigator, Jack decides he needs to find the truth. And what better way than to search for his former coach and Bigfoot? Jack's/Palecek's views are reflected in what Jack tells his listeners as he prepares to embark on his journey:To go looking for Bigfoot is to go in search of the truth about America.

I believe we are being manipulated minute by minute by a news media: television, print radio, that is based solely on profit, rather than the search for truth we imagine.

I believe we Americans have no idea what the truth is about our country. We know every name of the cast of "Survivor" but we do not know about the existence of "Operation Northwoods."

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I believe I have found out some things about the country I live in, and that is a freedom of sort, better than walking around in a fog.

We are criminals when we protect our bank accounts and your homes while others go without -- and then call ourselves Christians.

We are liars when we go across the world, kill others and call that protecting our own freedom.

When professional athletes go on television, say at Christmas, and say thanks to the troops for protecting our freedom, that it is huge lie. They are not protecting us. They are killing for Bush and Rumsfeld and Cheney and others to make the rich men even richer.

How stupid do they think we are?

The truth is not available in any newspaper stand or magazine or from the lips of Tom Brokaw.

To find the truth about America you have to look in the shadows, under the rocks, run after the loose pieces of paper blowing across the convenience store parking lot.

The truth about America is not to be found in any morning news meeting agenda for CBS.

It is to be found in the pencil scribbles of prisoners in solitary confinement in Terre Haute Penitentiary; it's slurred on the back of a Pine Ridge liquor store receipt, and scribbled on the walls above gas station restroom toilets.

If you want to find out the truth about America you need to open your mind. You need to be ready to believe in things they laugh about on "The Tonight Show" and over morning coffee at the truck stop.

You will need to say to hell with what you guys think. To hell with you guys -- there's something out there and I'm going to find out what it is.

You need to go looking for Bigfoot -- despite catcalls and in the face of neo-Nazi Brown Shirts ready to string you up from a lamp pole....Strong stuff. Yet it is just a taste of the views Jack expresses on Bigfoot Radio and as he ponders life and America in his search for Bigfoot. And Jack doesn't search from the isolation of a car on the highway or an airliner 30,000 feet above the country. Jack takes the bus from his Iowa home to the town in Oregon where his coach was last seen. He continues his radio program on his trip and meets compatriots (although not necessarily of identical ilk), those who oppose him and those who think he is just plain crazy. As Jack documents his search, we, too, begin to wonder whether he is crazy or there actually is something in the shadows and under the rocks.

Looking for Bigfoot expounds strong, radically left wing views. Some conservatives may call much of its content anti-American or liberal hate speech. Even liberals may disagree with some of what it says. But through Jack's thoughts and expressions, Palecek does what a novelist -- especially a political one -- should do: he challenges the reader to react and think.

Jack King's search ultimately produces a certain kind of truth for him and his family. The unanswered question is whether the reader will risk thinking, let alone go looking for Bigfoot.