Present time and distant past, Mexico.
"Amid the Mayan ruins of Na Chan, it is said, the bite of a sacred mushroom can send you hurtling back in time. Here, four Americans encounter contemporary Mexican revolutionaries, ancient Mayan prophecies -- and plumb the very core of their own lives.
"Eddie, once an international rock star, signed himself out of a psychiatric hospital years ago and wandered into the Mexican jungles looking for enlightenment. Thomas, his brother, is an idealistic anthropoligist searching for him with Lindsey -- Eddie's wife and the object of Thomas's unrequited desire. Carmichael, a young investigative reporter, finds himself more involved with the cause of a fierce, attractive revolutionary than he thought possible. These four will be swept up in a soul-changing odyssey into the Mayan underworld, where extraordinary secrets are revealed." [jacket blurb, US pbk, 1989]
"Finally, being a rock star just wasn't enough for Eddie. He used booze, sex, smack, 'ludes, anything to help him forget his need to know it all meant something. Then he went crazy and disappeared.
"The sacred mushrooms at Na Chan kept calling Eddie, and while he dreamt among circles in time, lots of crazy things started: His brother Thomas and his wife Linsey caught up with him; Carmichael, a journalist for Rolling Stone , tracked down Carla, the charismatic leader of a guerrilla outfit struggling for survival; and the Fighting 666th, a US private army -- funded by Irangate profits and CIA-backed, fighting under a fanatic quasi-religious banner to save the world from communism -- is about to overtake them all. All of them at Na Chan -- just in time to see the beginning of the end of the world.
"Lewis Shiner brings us face to face with the paranoia and confusion of a nuclear age; dragging hidden longings, guilt, fear and passion protesting into the open in one violent thriller of politics, ancient civilization and twentieth-century corruption. Deserted Cities of the Heart is an extraordinary achievement, exciting, erotic and totally fascinating." [jacket blurb, UK pbk, 1988]
"Set in Mexico in the present day and the long-ago days of the Mayan Empire, the book's cast includes an assortment of world-weary refugees from civilization a la Joseph Conrad and Robert Stone: squabbling Marxist and not-so-Marxist revolutionaries, Lacandon Indians (descendants of the Maya -- awaiting the turn of the cosmic wheel that signals xu'tan, the end of the world), and a rapacious and murderous horde of American mercenaries only too happy to give that wheel the necessary push. It boasts a wheels-within-wheels plot that manages with dexterity to combine Mayan cosmology, 'new age' philosophy and Chaos science with revolution and rock'n'roll, while interleaving elements of a thriller, a love story, and a time-travel fantasy with actual events, such as the Mexico City earthquake, the Iran-Contra scandal, and a Jimi Hendrix concert." --Paul Witcover (in Science Fiction Eye , Volume 1, Number 5, July 1989).
"Written by one of the cyberpunk originals. Although not strictly speaking a hardcore 'cyberpunk' novel, this excellent book has all of the mental richness and style you could ever expect from the best of the genre. This is a truly hallucinatory novel." --Henry W.Targowski (in Mark/Space , 1995).
Highly recommended.
