Cameron Smith seems a normal-enough teenage slacker--until he starts seeing things: firemonsters, a wizard, an angel. Sent first to drug counseling and then a psychologist, he is eventually diagnosed with a mad cow disease and ends up hospitalized. His vision of an angel tells him of a possible cure, and he's off-- accompanied by a hypochondriac dwarf and an enchanted lawn gnome who is also a Norse god--on a quixotic road trip featuring New Orleans jazz, a happiness cult, party week in Daytona (along with the partiers), a group of rogue physicists, snow globe guys who freeze life, Disney World, and, finally, the sea. This was a really good book and also, I think, an homage to Cervantes.