Neck Between Two Heads: A Story of Civilization and Superstition

by Ray Harvey

"One of the strangest, most unpredictable, most lyric books I've ever read." -- James Cole, Professor Emeritus, poetry, University of Wyoming

For decades, rumors of the "Maze Man" have haunted the Baboquivari Wilderness, a desert land located fifty miles southwest of Tucson, and beneath which runs a vast network of caves that many among the Tohono O'odham natives believe "the portal to hell." When a young Apache man named Jon Silverthorne moves into a haunted house directly beneath Baboquivari Peak, he's immediately by his desert neighbors looked upon suspiciously. He's treated with hostility. But Jon is not what people think. Solitary, calm, bookish, he seems in possession of some great secret — a man stranger than anyone suspects, or perhaps it's only an illusion. When his half brother Kristopher arrives unannounced, following the death of their mother, and moves in with Jon in his haunted dwelling among the cactus, a sequence of unexpected events is set into motion, and what Jon Silverthorne ultimately discovers inside the profoundest recesses of earth’s internal circuitry may show the world at last the colossal secrets that nature keeps.

Neck Between Two Heads is at once a philosophical mystery story, a lyric ode to the natural world and, perhaps most of all, a deep and devastating examination of all things superstitious and violent.

272 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 15, 2021

About the author

Ray Harvey was born and raised in the spectacular San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado. He's worked as a short-order cook, construction laborer, crab fisherman, janitor, bartender, copyeditor, pedi-cab driver, and more. He's the author of numerous published books and articles, but no matter where he's gone or what he's done to earn a living, there's always been literature and learning as the driving force in his life.