Trying to avoid his day-to-day struggles and unable to remember his life before nuclear war, Chaos attempts to live as one of the mutated survivors, until he is told that the bombs never fell and sets off on a journey for the truth. Tour. A funny post-apocalyptic road noir tale of Chaos, who lives in an abandoned projection booth at the Multiplex in Hatfork, Wyoming, and his journey to find the truth at the heart of his own American nightmare. A young man named Chaos sets out on a journey across a shattered America to search for the truth that lies behind his fragmented dreams. From Hatfork, Wyoming, a desert town populated by genetic mutants, to the Strip, where perpetual fast food establishments exist in a cultural vacuum, Chaos begins to piece together a history of the breakdown of reality. The author of Gun, with Occasional Music (LJ 2/15/94) embues his second novel with a breathtaking vision of a world in flux. Lethem's prose is as flexible and memorable as the evocative story he tells. Most libraries will want this foray into speculative fiction for their sf collections. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. Lethem follows his critically acclaimed crime novel pastiche, Gun with Occasional Music (1994), with a strikingly different vision of a postapocalyptic U.S. Chaos is an introverted occupant of a run-down movie theater in Hatfork, Wyoming, who is surrounded by mutant locals and living on canned food until he suspects that the local tyrant, Kellogg, has lied about the bombs that have supposedly destroyed the rest of the country. After stealing Kellogg's car and taking to the highway with a fur-covered runaway girl, Chaos discovers that each new town he comes to is afflicted with its own form of insanity, manifested by mass symptoms ranging from an imaginary, blinding green mist to an obsession with luck. Returning to his native San Francisco, Chaos suddenly remembers his previous identity as a man named Moon and discovers the power his own dreams can have to cure the madness around him. In a remarkable display of versatility, Lethem tempers a liberal dose of quirky surrealism with interesting, believable characterizations and a compelling, imaginative story line. Carl Hays