Profile/review for Outside Magazine. Excerpt:

"Desert Oracle is hard to explain. For one thing, it’s not just a radio show—it’s also a (more or less) quarterly print periodical with the same name. Both mediums cover an odd mix of desert-related miscellany, from the political and paranormal to the historical and environmental. In any given episode or issue, Layne might dive into the dangers of consumer culture or the strange dreams he’s having because of the pandemic. But mostly he focuses on local lore: stories of missing hikers, ghost stags, and Yucca Man sightings (the regional equivalent of Bigfoot). The project’s tagline is "The Voice of the Desert.'"

If it’s your first time or one of many trips to the Mojave Desert, Desert Oracle can introduce you to some of the characters who were influenced by or tried to define the land in their own terms. These stories could not unfold in any other environment. The mixture of desert, plants, animal life, as well as folklore and legend, are brought forth in short chapters that could easily be told around a campsite. Each tale seems more like what you would hear just before closing time at a local bar after the tourists have cleared out…..now it’s just you and a few old-time stragglers. Some stories are familiar, some surprising, but all reveal that there is more to the area than the average tourist encounters. Recommended for desert trekkers.

I bought an issue of Desert Oracle to send to a friend once after a visit to Joshua Tree. I was delighted to see them collected together, and I quite enjoyed the meandering timelines and subjects covered in this first volume. I must have bookmarked a dozen or more spots on my maps for future exploration, and did a lot of research on the people and places mentioned in the various stories.

If you are a desert lover, particularly in the American Southwest, you will absolutely love this collection of stories and tales.

The book starts out very wisely in letting you know how to survive the desert – bring lots of water, more than you think you need. If you get lost, or your car breaks down, stay by your car! There are brief mentions of those who didn’t make it out…

The next section is about the Yucca Man, and other very short tales of a creature seen in the desert called by many names, such as Bigfoot.

A little boy is lost. A scout leader failed in his job.

It goes from there….

These are little vignettes…tales of quirky people and tales of mysterious things that may be true, or not (ghost bighorn sheep).

Most of the entries read like snippets, not complete stories, and the writing tends to jump from one thought to another, then end abruptly. But don’t let that dissuade you from reading this. It adds to the sense, a layer to the oddness that are desert dwellers.

As a compilation, there tends to be a few places where something is repeated. For myself, too much on UFO’s and aliens when considering the whole work, would have liked more on history of place, or characters, those were the better entries. The snippets are of varying length with one section about cowboy music being very long. The writing isn’t polished either, you take what you can get when you’re out on the desert.

The book also contains photos and line drawings, which adds to the character of the book.

You don’t have to love the desert, but if you do this book will thrill you!

"...Reading this book is like swapping tales around the campfire under a star-filled sky. Recommended for Art Bell fans and naturalists..." Full review to be published in Booklist.

Delightfully strange, this series of vignettes about life, myths, legends and cautions about life in the Mojave desert is a fun and quirky read.

An easy-to-read chronicle of the absolute weirdness of the desert. Inspiring a lot of trip planning for the future.