One morning, two years after Petey Myshkin Stephenson's mysterious adventures in "Otherwise," he and his best friend Chace Fusillade, who is very skeptical about this place "that both does-and doesn't-exist," are both swept away to sea and abducted by pirates in a world that has hardly changed in two and a half centuries, and where there is no U.S.A. because the original colonies lost the war against the British. There the boys discover they have been locked in together with a beautiful Chantilly cat and a bulldog, who they soon befriend.
After a sea battle with two enemy ships, the ship is wrecked, and the boys become castaways with the two animals.
A storm sweeps Petey and Chace to an island in a place called Biestia ruled by animals. The island is ruled by foxes, who imprison the boys. Word that these two denizens of humanity have been captured rapidly spreads, and representatives of all of the animals of Biestia converge on the island to try the boys for the crimes of humanity against the animal kingdom.
Miraculously, the Chantilly cat and the bulldog show up at the trial (they had been swept up by the storm to another part of the island) and defend the boys before the animal court, which erupts in fury.
The four escape and are hidden in a cave they have to burrow through after many a misadventure to escape. After climbing across a mountain in the middle of the island in flight from their pursuers, they discover, anchored in a harbor on the island, the two "enemy" ships that had sunk the pirate ship; they are actually crewed by cats and dogs related to their friends.
The Chantilly and the bulldog (Madame Tontine and Hamilcar by name) are both best friends and members of the royal houses of their respective kingdoms; they had been abducted by the pirates long ago and kept for ransom. There is jubilation by the two crews (one of which is manned by the Chantilly's daughter) now that their search is ended.
Another sea battle is fought as the two ships, discovered by the enraged beasts of Biestia, try to escape. The dogs' ship sinks in the battle, and the cats' ship escapes out to sea. But the bulldog manages to cling to piece of wreckage and is later rescued.
The four companions return to the land they all had started from - geographically the same, though so different given their different "histories" - to great rejoicing among the dogs and cats, and there is a pledge of mutual allegiance between Petey and Chace and the animals.
At the very end, Petey and Chace rediscover the portal to the "real" world. But on returning, Chace almost drowns and forgets everything that just happened, and Petey is left wondering, once again, whether what he just lived through was just a dream.
I grew up near the Atlantic seaboard and in the farm country of eastern Pennsylvania, and later in what many call Mexico's most beautiful city, Guadalajara; immersing myself in Russian fiction and English poetry and the Romantic music I found in my father's dusty record collection. I began writing my own stories and poems, a pirate romance and a philosophical novel; putting on magic shows and puppet plays, printing a daily "newspaper," dabbling in oil paints, inventing radio plays on a tape recorder, composing "classical music," and experimenting with a chemistry set that one day nearly blew up my bedroom. I managed to survive my perpetually changing hobbies and became school president of my junior high school, the murderer in a school detective play, and, in my senior year, poetry editor of my high school magazine. I joined a revolutionary brigade of rebellious students at Temple University, where I studied history, literature and philosophy in between bouts of guerrilla theater and counseling disaffected teenagers in the suburbs and ghettoes of Philadelphia. By my early twenties I was publishing journalism in countercultural and mainstream periodicals, giving poetry readings, and directing theater in Philadelphia, where I lived at the time.In the early 1970s I won the Temple University Student Poetry contest and in the late 1970s drove with a friend across the country to California, and have lived in San Francisco ever since. My essays, criticism, experimental fiction, and poetry have appeared in literary magazines and periodicals in the United States and Great Britain. I have also given readings in cities across the U.S. and in Canada and the U.K.My first published book, A Spy in the Ruins, was hailed by the Miguel de Cervantes Award‒winning novelist Juan Goytisolo as one of the finest American novels of the new century and compared to the work of Thomas Pynchon and William Gass. I have published two other novels since: Voyage to a Phantom City (". . . an enormous achievement ... a spare beauty in all its baroque splendor". -- Peter Bush, award-winning translator) and Meditations on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars' Cafe, "An . . . often captivating love story" - Kirkus Reviews) as well as two collections of short fiction: In the American Night ("a new classic of American fiction" - Martine Compton) and Dangerous Stories for Boys ("There is something for everyone in these stories" - Pauline Butcher Bird).My first book of poetry, The Rose Shipwreck: Poems and Photographs ("a haunting juxtaposition of verse and photos [that] shouldn't be missed by any who appreciate urban images, poetry, and art" - D. Donovan, Midwest Book Review), appeared in 2013, and my second, Chien Lunatique (a work of "visionary authority" - Ernest Hilbert, winner of the 2017 Poets' Prize), five years later. My third collection - The Socialist's Garden of Verses - won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was named one of the "Top 100 Indie Books of 2021" by Kirkus Reviews. I have also written plays produced and radio broadcast in the Bay Area. I have published journalism in many periodicals across the U.S. and am a contributing writer for Synchronized Chaos Magazine. My work has been nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Web.In 1989 I founded, and am currently co-editor, of the literary and arts webzine Caveat Lector. I lived as the domestic partner of the translator and interpreter Keiko Kuroda for four decades until her death in early 2021. I now live alone in a penthouse apartment I call "The Aerie" as it sits on a windy bluff with a view across downtown San Francisco and the north Bay; with Tonton (the last of the many cats we brought up together) and a garden of lilies, acacia, climbing vines and roses tucked behind The Aerie that Keiko cultivated over her final years.
