A bond deeper than love and stronger than death.
Help Me Rhonda
is a very unconventional love story, exploring the dark side of the concept of "soul mates." Brian and Rhonda are damaged people, attempting to join their fractured halves into a complete whole. Their story is told in three parts, unspooled concurrently as parallel timelines. Brian and Rhonda meet in high school in the eighties. Brian's unconditional devotion to the promiscuous and self-destructive Rhonda provides her with one solid thing in her chaotic life. This section plays like the darkest, edgiest movie John Hughes never made, complete with a climactic scene at the prom. A few years later. Rhonda re-enters Brian's life as he's mired in a loveless marriage to a woman with whom he's fathered a son. Brian abandons his wife and child to follow Rhonda on an ill-fated quest to find her father in Florida. On the long highway to hell (or Miami), Brian and Rhonda encounter a pregnant teenage runaway, a reclusive cult author and a travelling serial killer. In the final timeline, Brian and Rhonda embark together on a long, strange journey across a surreal "shadow America." These two battered spirits cling to one another in their epic search for a peaceful place of rest, in a quest filled with visceral hallucinogenic imagery and dark, absurd comedy. WARNING: This novel contains descriptions of sexual abuse and rape.