Thorn Tree

Ludington (Tiger In a Trance) delivers a vibrant narrative of art, love, and the lingering damage of 1960s excess. Daniel Tunison, a retired schoolteacher in Los Angeles, briefly became famous in the 1970s for his sculpture “Thorn Tree,” a massive scrap metal construction in the Mojave Desert. The nonlinear narrative delves into Daniel’s painful source of inspiration for the piece. At a 1969 Grateful Dead concert in San Francisco, his girlfriend, Rachel, runs into an ominous figure from her past, and she and Daniel flee the show. On the way back to L.A., they pull off the highway and find refuge under a tree, which, in their LSD-fueled haze, seems to exude mystical powers. The events that follow are murky, and the night ends with Rachel falling from a cliff to her death. Daniel then serves a brief prison sentence for trafficking LSD, and after he gets out, he builds the sculpture in homage to the tree under which he last saw Rachel. In the present, Daniel befriends his new neighbor Jack Dressler, who is prone to alcoholic rages and reveries of his time in a 1960s cult. One day, Jack menacingly implies to Daniel that he knows what happened to Rachel. From there, Ludington rachets up the suspense as Daniel and Jack’s encounters build to a reckoning and a dangerous showdown. Readers won’t want to put this down. (Apr.)