As obsessive, absorbing and funny as Thomas Pynchon's CRYING OF LOT 49 - THE BUZZING's main character, Roscoe Baragon, is a 42 year-old journalist who was once a crack-reporter, but has degenerated into, well, mostly just cracked. After years of writing for major city newspapers, Baragon settles into a rut where he produces rather shoddy reporting on the various conspiracy theories fed to him by his network of less-than-sane "informants", and he publishes these theories in his column called The Kook Beat. Over time, Baragon begins to get sucked into the paranoid world of the conspiracy theorist himself... what follows is a wonderful portrait of a man losing his grip on one reality and maybe seeing some truths in another... afterall, can the conspiracy theorists be wrong all the time?