DINKLE’S LIFE tells the story of Dr. Lonnie Paul Dinkle, now a famous mathematician and philosopher at Cimarron College in southern Oklahoma. His secret burden involves desecration of an ancient burial mound and release of three exceedingly dangerous spirits so wisely interred by the Native People. Dinkle’s life’s work consists of four great philosophical masterpieces—Theory of Complex Systems, Mystic Experience Correlates, Subatomic Sociology, and The Nature of God—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 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.
