America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic is a metafictional, maximalist, experimental book about writing a book while waiting for a book to arrive in the mail, and the mysterious transmissions from expatriate American author Rick Harsch, whose novel The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas altered the unusual lives of author Phillip Freedenberg and illustrator Jeff Walton, who both reside in Buffalo, New York. The novel’s quixotically plotted architecture of fictional and non-fictional action contains an alternative American history and, ultimately, a new possible world, nested within a complex labyrinthian Mandelbrot fractal structure that encases a diagnostic theoretical index of ideas. Phillip and Jeff navigate an unusual world, inhabited by the character-surrogates Rick Harsch and philosopher David Miller, on an eccentric, chaotic, alchemical, experimental odyssey that occurs inside and outside the book itself. And all this under the existential umbrella of a decaying, dystopian America, where everything — including the word itself — is at risk. America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic explores philosophy, neuroscience, totalitarianism, alchemy, technology, psychology, cosmology, psychedelia, politics, physics, mystery, adventure, absurdism, poetry, and literature within an obscured hero's quest.