Note: If you’re interested in the audio book version, please read to the end.

Recently retired Zach Amstead is telling his adult daughter Abbie about his childhood experiences and those of his best friend Willan Terrance. Zach’s and Billy’s paranormal powers started to emerge. Billy began seeing shadowy glimpses of the future and Zach was beginning to participate in his lucid dreams. These abilities were beyond their capacity to understand, or control. Nor could they make sense of the world around them as these abilities began to become apparent to others, albeit not clearly.

Adults in authority in the nineteen sixties have no time for what they consider mental outliers of the baby boom. The boys are institutionalized, marginalized, and ignored. Zach’s father learns of the challenges they face as children and knows the dangers they will face as adults. With no way to comprehend how these boys perceive and move within their world, he must find a way to guide them.

Knuckleheads is the backstory to the trilogy that follows. It isn’t required reading, but many people have said in positive reviews of the trilogy that they were glad they read this book first. The two boys, grew up in the 1960s amid all of that decade’s advancements, awakenings, pop culture, and crises. Aspects of these various societal shifts affected these boys in different ways, and the effects are baggage that each boy carried into adulthood.

In looking back to the sixties, to the foundational environmental elements which are so important to the formation of the characters’ psyches, it is important to understand that this is the time in which the adult characters were boys. It is the setting of Knuckleheads. While some places in the setting are real, the events highlighted in this book are fiction, and they are presented here to provide a deeper understanding of these characters.

I never considered that some of the societal events and struggles which defined the sixties would reappear in the second decade of the twenty first century. The similarity between these otherwise disparate periods was not planned and I am not offering these stories as a commentary on any aspects of the twenty-first century.

If you are listening to the audio version, I hope you can pick up on Zach’s thoughts. In the print books, these small sections are italicized. The virtual voice pauses, sometimes, at these points. In any case, I think it reads or is being read fairly well.

If you like speculative fiction with a touch of technology, humanity and a bit of religion balanced by some sarcasm shared among family and good friends, you will enjoy this book.