Signal Boost: Chameleo by Robert Guffey

I’ve known Robert Guffey for almost 20 years. We met at the Clarion West Writers Workshop in Seattle. His fiction playfully explores issues of paranoia, conspiracy theories, secret societies and subcultures. His work, full of vast and somewhat offbeat scholarship, is also imbued with a Southern Californian sensibility that reminds one both of the trippy work of Philip K. Dick and the Sunshine State Noir of Tarantino (circa Pulp Fiction). His writing is emotionally warmer, and he has a deep affection for his oddball characters.

I’ve started his latest work, Chameleo, a nonfiction account of governmental conspiracy (with elements of memoir), but it reads like a novel. I could see the director Paul Thomas Anderson adapting it for the screen.

Here’s the blurb:

A mesmerizing mix of Charles Bukowski, Hunter S. Thompson, and Philip K. Dick, Chameleo is a true account of what happened in a seedy Southern California town when an enthusiastic and unrepentant heroin addict named Dion Fuller sheltered a U.S. Marine who’d stolen night vision goggles and perhaps a few top secret files from a nearby military base.

Robert Guffey’s website: http://cryptoscatology.blogspot.com