Road Ghosts: A Memoir
Road Ghosts, Christopher’s new coming-of-age memoir, is a fully completed and revised 313-page book now being shopped to agents and publishers. Contact Christopher to request the manuscript, samples, or book synopsis and marketing plan.
In this sprawling lyrical road adventure, Christopher explores America and himself in a quest for liberation, purpose, and reawakening. Struggling in San Francisco amid the 1991 recession, toiling at temp jobs and chronically broke, Cook hits the road in his rusted Toyota hatchback with a few hundred dollars and piles of books, clothes, a manual typewriter, and $90 worth of canned foods.
Road Ghosts offers readers a rollicking and colorful journey traversing California, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Minnesota, and several other states. Exploring far-flung towns on dirt roads, gun shows, hobo alleys, and back country rancher bars, Cook evokes a poetic passion for adventure and the American landscape. On the road, Cook encounters a striking array of characters: Clifford, a soaringly tall rail-skinny old man spinning yarns from the Bible in a town park; Loomis, a self-described war hero who puts the author up in his trailer for a few days in Ringling, Montana; Cecil, a bone-weary philosophical Idaho rancher contemplating second chances; tale-telling “snow birds” drifting around America in their mobile homes; punk rockers crammed in a Minneapolis attic, hiding from the police; right-wing pamphleteers in an Iowa roadside parking lot; and many others.
Road Ghosts unfolds a tale that’s both timeless and timely: an earnest probing journey, and a passionate search for meaning and purpose in America, at a time when Americans are thirsting for adventure, escape, and meaning in this age of pandemic, chronic economic struggle, and our relentlessly digitized and curated world. Road Ghosts offers readers a fresh, compelling, and expansive view into a different way of living and thinking.
Advance Praise for Road Ghosts:
“This is an exciting and brave book. In Road Ghosts, Christopher Cook takes us beyond the usual terrain of memoirs with a fresh poetic voice and a penetrating inquiry of both himself and our times. The writing is beautiful and searching, as is Cook’s quest. What a fun, riveting, and soul-opening ride this book is. Cook has created something profoundly fresh and alive.”
“Cook’s story is so much about being broke in America. Cook owns it all: the highways, the dust, the literature, the truth of what it means to be young and unmoored, impoverished and full of passion.”