The California novelist T.C. Boyle has often taken true stories and created alternative histories, from John Harvey Kellog and the birth of the breakfast cereal in The Road to Wellville to Alfred Kinsey and the creation of sexology in The Inner Circle. This might draw comparisons with James Ellroy, Boyle’s exact contemporary, except that where Ellroy aims at the very darkest version of a tabloid reality, Boyle takes a New Age perspective conveyed though whimsy and surrealism.