HIS69-262 Turned-On Chicken
Turned-On Chicken
HIS69
HIS69-262
Samuel West
$2.95
Foreword
Caleb was a runaway orphan and Matt was the farmer he was running away from.
Turned-on Chicken, however, is not an expose of scandalous conditions in American orphan asylums. Nor is it a scholarly treatise on the problems besetting our legions of runaway children. Still less does this book offer insights into the cultivation of cornstalks.
This is the story of a boy’s zigzag, hit and miss journey into manhood. Caleb’s odyssey embraces only a tiny segment of the great Mid-western prairie. The naive but enterprising young orphan isn’t seeking adventure. He is seeking a way of life almost unknown to him before he sets off on his travels. Almost unknown to him. In a dim farmhouse attic, Matt provides enough clues to fire a youngster’s imagination. His imagination fired and part of his anatomy aching acutely, Caleb flees from the farm to the outside world. To the small, happy town of Meckleburg and its shadowy, sinister Jungle.
Meckleburg’s Jungle isn’t like any bush country you’ve heard about. Burt O’Hara, two-fisted deputy sheriff and leading prowler, calls the Jungle, “Our local fairgrounds.” At the fairgrounds, near the pond replete with skinny dippers and portly voyeurs, Caleb has himself a picnic. With Eddie, his hung but hesitant roommate. With Rich, whose ambivalent attitudes are puzzling when he gives Caleb a minute to ponder. With Luke, Meckleburg’s brawniest citizen. With a cluster of eager small fry and transients and casual cruisers. And, inevitably, with the sheriff.
In its serious overtones, Turned-on Chicken explored the psyche of a little boy lost in an adult world. In order to survive he must claw his way upward—like an adult None of his friends or lovers complain because it’s so much fun to be clawed and coddled by Caleb. The boy doesn’t discover a way of life, he invents one. You’ll wish you had Caleb’s flair for invention as well as his other attributes too numerous to mention.
1 review for HIS69-262 Turned-On Chicken
timonruhl –
Synopsis by Eric Boyd
Life at the orphanage was really quite pleasant for Caleb. It was at fifteen, when sold into bondage, that things went sour. It wasn’t that he minded the back-breaking work on Matt Jenner’s farm, it was the butt-breaking work the farmer subjected him to each night. And he wouldn’t have even minded that if it hadn’t been for Matt’s attitude…and fourteen inches. So off Caleb runs to the small, happy (self-proclaimed) town of Meckleburg. He quickly lands with Eddie, the young owner of the diner. And when Eddie offers to share his bed, Caleb just assumes he wants a sample of the boy’s ten inches. But it seems Eddie is pure as snow, so Caleb sniffs out others in town who aren’t—like the Deputy Sheriff, and his son, and the son’s buddy, and Luke, the garage owner, and etc, etc. When Eddie finally comes…round, Caleb’s interest turns back to fourteen inches he’s begun to miss.