Dinkle's Life: A Spiritual Biography

DINKLE’S LIFE is the ultimate ghost story. Dr. Lonnie Paul Dinkle, now a famous mathematician and philosopher at Cimarron College in southern Oklahoma, has a secret burden, namely, his teenage desecration of an ancient burial mound and release of three exceedingly dangerous spirits so wisely interred by the Native People, spirits that now plague modern civilization, especially the West. His trek through the Plains to find those spirits, kill them, and return them to their graves, is a grand panorama of American life, especially that of rural and agricultural communities and the characters who live there. Dinkle’s life’s work consists of four great philosophical masterpiecesâ€"Theory of Complex Systems, Mystic Experience Correlates, Subatomic Sociology, and The Nature of Godâ€"all impossibly arcane and filled will with equations and proofs. But all through his successful career as a thinker, he’s carried his Ma’s demand that he find those spirits, kill them, and return them to their graves. The fact that his mother was a real, true, witch, and that those spirits are now incarnate, makes the task difficult enough so that Dinkle enlists an unsuspecting student newspaper journalist, Jimmy Bolt, an orphan, as help. As Dinkle dug into the mound, so Bolt digs through Dinkle’s office and life, and the result is an epic journey through time, space, culture, the American Central Plains agricultural economy, the banking industry, and, strange as it seems, the Universe beyond our galaxy. The ghosts are still with us: The God of Fiction produces the lies of men in power; the God of Growth stimulates us to increase our use, exponentially, of limited resources; and, the God of the Group drives us to hate “the other” with a passion that leads so often to violence. DINKLE’S LIFE is a ghost story, yes, but one with profound meaning for the modern world.