Kerfuffle!

In January 2018, I flew from Los Angeles to Siem Reap to visit two of my best friends. Over the course of fifteen days, I witnessed the fallout in the expat community following the raid of a local bar crawl, found shelter beneath a neon merry-go-round in the middle of a rain-swept Sihanoukville jungle, and discovered that—when it comes to kerfuffles—sometimes it’s best to just sit back and enjoy the tuk tuk ride. 

At the start of his adventure, all N____ wants is to smoke, drink, and catch up with his friends in an exotic foreign country. But when one of his friends’ fellow expats gets sent to prison, hatching a kerfuffle of international proportions, it’s up to N____ to keep the peace between his two quarreling friends—and to finally take control over his own vacation.  But what do you do when it’s not just your friends, but chaos and order themselves that are threatening to tear your world apart? The Kerfuffologists swear they don’t know anything, and that just might be the perfect place to start. 

Kerfuffle! is a zany roman à clef (i.e. travel fiction) that will especially appeal to lovers of Tom Robbins, Jack Kerouac, and Hunter S. Thompson. A simple web search for “Cambodia backpackers arrested” should turn up heaps of media coverage for this significant real-life news story. But even these articles barely scratch the surface of this astonishing tale of extortion and political corruption.

 (113,000-word novel; coming TBD)