The Mescalero Project

Lord of the Flies

Inmates trapped in a clandestine, experimental biosphere hidden in the desert and abandoned by a warden gone mad, who has left them free from their cells but unable to escape from the dome, hoping that they will kill each other off. If they want to survive, they will have to....

Doug Buchs was born restless in Darien, Connecticut, in the middle of WWII. After squandering a free education at Colgate University, he abandoned a secure future in corporate management, chasing a childhood fantasy to cross the United States on horseback.

He has worked on an oyster sloop on Long Island Sound, and a shrimp boat in Key West. He has been a working cowboy in Aspen, a logger in Centennial, Wyoming, an artist's model in New York City. He has worked on the slaughter house "kill floor" in Denver, trucked 48 states with his own tractor/trailer rig, bartended in Seattle, and been a heavy equipment operator in Alaska. He has also crossed the country by rail – in handcuffs.

Whatever he had been looking for he found when he moved to Massachusetts in 1984. He is settled now on the North Shore. It's the longest he’s ever lived in one place since graduating from high school. And he finally returned to school for some unfinished business, receiving his B.A. in a double major - Sociology and Biblical Studies - from Gordon College, Summa Cum Laude as a Pike Scholar.

If his bizarre journey resembling a leaf blown by the wind was to serve any purpose, the stories had to be told. He has published short works regionally and internationally. The Mescalero Project, is his first published novel.

Doug Buchs has constructed an intricately imagined world that is self-contained in every sense. Under the great dome, with its own micro-climate, a society based at first on vengeance and horror undergoes an astonishing, but utterly convincing, transformation. Mr. Buchs has written a page-turning story of considerable moral and psychological complexity. The pivotal character of James Stryker is as mysterious and compelling for the reader as for his fellow inmates in the sinister prison known as the Mescalero Project.
- Janette Turner Hospital, novelist, author, and Carolina Distinguished Professor of English at the University of South Carolina.

The Mescalero Project has everything a great read should have: a dense, intricate plot; characters you believe in and care about passionately; language that is vivid and fresh - a sustained pleasure to read. But this page-turner does much more than entertain: it teases you into thought, planting questions that stay with you long after you've put the book down. What hidden resources in the human spirit can change us in unexpected ways? What forces can threaten to turn society into a mob? What can cause the opposite? His first novel, Mr. Buchs writes with the grace and confidence of a man who's been writing all his life.
- Rhina P. Espaillat, award winning author and poet.

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