Annie Salem

In this, his second novel, Mac Wellman continues his exploration begun in his award-winning plays A Murder of Crows and The Hyacinth Macaw - of a low-rent rural America, festering in the backwater pollution from the urban environment.

Wellman's astonishing Ohio-like world has been tagged by some theatergoers and critics as "Macland," a world peopled by cantankerous, wistful, confused, and frightened people who have lost parts of their body, their minds, and their souls to the perpetual machine of the American dream. In Annie Salem, young Jack Scan hangs out in the local woods near the Anger River valley, where he witnesses strange goings-on and discovers the rare "blue monkeys" of the semi-wilds. Meanwhile, back in town he is in love with Annie Salem and shares some of his riverside adventures with her.

But like all true Romeos, he must first undergo his own voyage into manhood, which he achieves through a fantastic adventure to Mars and beyond - a voyage that, upon his return, enables him to settle into the strange everyday world of Northern Ohio as if it were Grovers Corners of Thornton Wilder's Our Town.