Desert Oracle

Volume 1: Strange True Tales from the American Southwest

By: Ken Layne

Narrated by: Ken Layne

Length: 6 hrs and 30 mins

Publisher's summary

This program is read by the author, Ken Layne, host of the Desert Oracle radio show. It includes an exclusive first listen to a story from Desert Oracle: Volume 2.

The cult-y field guide to the strange and intriguing secrets of the Mojave—its myths and legends, outcasts and oddballs, flora, fauna, and UFOs—becomes the definitive, oracular book of the desert.

For the past five years, Desert Oracle has existed as a quasi-mythical, quarterly periodical available to the very determined only by subscription or at the odd desert-town gas station or the occasional hipster boutique, its canary-yellow-covered, forty-four-page issues handed from one curious desert zealot to the next, word spreading faster than the printers could keep up with. It became a radio show, a podcast, a live performance. Now, for the first time—and including both classic and new, never-before-seen revelations—Desert Oracle is available as an audiobook.

Straight out of Joshua Tree, California, Desert Oracle is “The Voice of the Desert”: a field guide to the strange tales, singing sand dunes, sagebrush trails, artists and aliens, authors and oddballs, ghost towns and modern legends, musicians and mystics, scorpions and saguaros, out there in the sand. Desert Oracle is your companion at a roadside diner, around a campfire, in your tent or cabin (or high-rise apartment or suburban living room) as the wind and the coyotes howl outside at night.

From journal entries of long-deceased adventurers to stray railroad ad copy, and musings on everything from desert flora, rumored cryptid sightings, and other paranormal phenomena, Ken Layne's Desert Oracle collects the weird and the wonderful of the American Southwest into a single, essential volume.

A Macmillan Audio production from MCD Books.

©2020 Ken Layne (P)2022 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

“UFOs, doomed hikers, William Burroughs, singing sand dunes, Elvis, ghosts, roadrunners and rattlesnakes—the Desert Oracle packs a lot of weird, dark matter between its bright yellow covers.”—Dominic Rushe, The Guardian

“[Desert Oracle serves] as a field guide to a seemingly barren place that is paradoxically full of life and legends. [Layne] leads us into the Mojave Wilderness, a vast area containing gophers, coyotes, Yucca Man, a hermit ballerina, mysterious cacti, 10-foot-tall warriors, space aliens, and more.”—Blaise Zerega, Alta Magazine

“The desert is a powerful cocktail of breathtaking beauty, brutality, and mystery. Layne serves it straight-up in this collection of essays dedicated to his cherished, arid homeland . . . [Desert Oracle] is a soulful love letter to the rugged landscape of the American Southwest. Layne implores readers to preserve and protect the enigmatic and wild desert. Reading this book is like swapping tales around the campfire under a star-filled sky.”—Michelle Ross, Booklist

Great stories of the desert

This also applies to anyone who loves the four North American deserts and noir stories about them.

THE Voice of the Desert

Love, love, love!
Great stories, music and reading by Ken
An excellent replay, as well.

best heard while driving in the desert at night

While living in Southern California, I would drive out to the desert at least once a month and camp under the stars. My favorite set-up was an old army cot that I would level out with backpacking pads and a thick Levi quilt my mom had made. I'd go to sleep on that cot, flat on my back, looking for shooting stars and Russian satellites while scanning the shortwave bands with my Sony ICF-2002 . I never saw UFOs out there, but I did see guys shooting off parachute flares on a distant dry lake bed. One night we were out rabbit hunting and noticed lights blinking SOS flashes at us. We drove towards the flashes, and after many miles of dodging creosote bushes, we discovered a small group of Boy Scouts, practicing their Morse code.

I love the desert, and I can tell by this book Ken Layne loves the desert too. It's jam-packed with some of my favorite subjects: Art Bell, Area 51, Joshua Tree, the Mojave desert, UFOs, survival, solitude, camping, hiking, the local desert plants and animals, crazy desert people, and crazy history that occurred in these desolate places.