This author participates in the Readers' Favorite Free Book Program, which is open to all readers and is completely free. The author will provide you with a free copy of their book in exchange for an honest review. You and the author will discuss what sites you will post your review to and what kind of copy of the book you would like to receive (eBook, PDF, Word, paperback, etc.). To begin, click the purple email icon to send this author a private email.
Doug Buchs was born restless in Darien, Connecticut, in 1942. After squandering a free education at Colgate University, he abandoned a secure future in corporate management to attempt to cross the United States on horseback.
He has worked on an oyster sloop on Long Island Sound, and a shrimp boat in Key West. He has been a working cowboy in Aspen, a logger in Centennial, Wyoming, an artist's model in New York City. He has worked the slaughterhouse "kill floor" in Denver, trucked 48 states with his own tractor/trailer rig, bartended in Seattle, operated heavy equipment in Alaska. He has also crossed the country on a train...in handcuffs.
Whatever he had been looking for he found when he married his fourth wife (an extraordinary woman to say the least), in Massachusetts in 1986. He is settled now on the North Shore; it's the longest he’s ever lived in one place since high school. And he finally went back to school for his BA, which he earned Summa Cum Laude, at Gordon College.
If his bizarre journey resembling a leaf blown by the wind was to mean anything, the stories would need to be told. He has published short works regionally and internationally. The Mescalero Project is his first published novel and came out again in 2008 through the Author’s Guild Back in Print program, with a new cover and ISBN.
Reviewed by Carine Engelbrecht for Readers' Favorite
In the Mescalero Project, Doug Buchs introduces his readers to a secret waiting in the desert. Once it was isolated and heavily guarded. Now it appears mysteriously abandoned. Or is it? The Mescalero Project was created as an experimental prison colony, housing the type of inmates society had given up on. Lack of contact with the outside world exacted a heavy toll on the psyche of some of the men. Then, one day, without explanation the rules change and the mind games begin. What exactly happened here? Decades after the fact, a lone visitor, Moss, is trying to uncover the secrets of Mescalero without falling prey to its hidden surprises.
The atmosphere of the book is taut as the reader is led along the claustrophobic labyrinth of the prison. Its characters are intriguing enough to hook you and stalk your comprehension, word for word, bit by bit and, as prisoners are sometimes rehabilitated, so the reader is drawn from suspense into a very human tale of survival. There is Stryker, the enigmatic living ghost freed from solitary confinement, who leaves a surprisingly detailed record in his journals and the glow of his mystical visions. There is Moss, the explorer and excavator, uncovering lies and betrayals decades old, although his motives are not quite clear. Why is he so secretive about his actions? And what does he hope to find within the dome? And then there is the mysterious abandonment of the inmates at Mescalero to their own fate. Why? What happened in the outside world? The battles sketched by Doug Buchs in The Mescalero Project are both physical and psychological as a dystopian future vision unfolds.
