Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberg.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, hello. I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm. This is a very unusual week because my guest has written four novels, but he's better known for his work on television.

His name is David Docovney, and indeed, he wouldn't be here if I didn't find this novel, a very special novel.

The book is called Truly Like Lightning.

It's by my guest, David Dukovny.

And it takes place very near to where my show is taken.

I have lived in Los Angeles for the last 40 years.

I was born in New York, and this book is most of it set in the desert

just by the Joshua Tree National Park.

Its protagonist is a man named Bronson Powers.

In order to inherit the property he lives on, in the desert, his grandmother deeded him the property he lives on in the desert. His grandmother deeded him the property,

but the requirement was that he convert to Mormonism. He wanted to convert to the original

Mormonism, not just the multiple lives, but the concept of blood sacrifice.

It's quite an intense inheritance from Joseph Smith.

David Docovne had been a graduate student at Yale, an undergraduate at Princeton,

and he studied with Harold Bloom, who wrote a book called the American Religion

...