One Should Never Die in the Back of a Toyota Camry And Other Important Lessons from the Island of Guam is a darkly comic supernatural thriller soaked in island folklore, WWII conspiracies, an inadvisable amount of generational trauma, and a Toyota Camry. More on the Camry later.
Walter San Nicolas is a washed-up pitchman, failed motivational speaker, and by any reasonable metric, an all-around piece of shit. When he returns home to Guam for his brother’s funeral, he stumbles into a decades-old mystery involving a pair of skulls, some missing loot, a semi-famous Japanese straggler, and an existential hitman named Tusso.
Then things get weird.
American Gods meets Rivers of London on the island where
America’s day begins.
WHY SUPPORT THIS PROJECT
There’s never really been a book quite like this one, set on Guam.
(Bold claim. But it’s true.)
It’s haunting, absurd, and occasionally hilarious, but it’s also an honest-ish, slightly surreal portrait of Guam from someone who actually grew up there. So the island isn’t just there to make the story feel weird or exotic. It gets to be weird on its own terms.
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The STORY
Walter San Nicolas is what you’d charitably call a professional fuck-up.
AA former infomercial pitchman with exactly one legitimate success, Walt rode a brief wave of fame straight into a wall of lawsuits, scams, and increasingly humiliating public appearances. His second act didn’t fare much better. Rebranding himself as Walt Jensen, a late-night real estate guru and creator of the now-under-investigation Dare to Dream: Turning Tough Breaks Into Big Breaks, he built a minor empire out of cable-access optimism, motivational buzzwords, and what some might generously describe as light fraud.
He also sees things.
For a while, Walt blamed that on the brain tumor he’d been diagnosed with. Then it turned out the tumor was fake too, which left him with no real medical explanation for the very odd things he was seeing. Just a new reality in which reality itself was becoming increasingly iffy. The drinking helped. He just wasn’t sure in which direction.
Then, midway through a promising suicide attempt, Walt’s phone rang. His younger brother Eli was dead. Heroically, in Yemen, naturally, stealing what little thunder Walt had left. Which was almost as annoying as it was devastating.
So, against his better judgment—or more accurately, against his will, Walt returns to Guam for an 18-day funeral for a brother he hadn’t spoken to in twenty years.
A reluctant homecoming takes a strange turn when Walt stumbles neck first into a decades-old conspiracy involving a pair of skulls, some missing loot, and a mildly vengeful Japanese straggler.
Along the way, he reconnects with his chaos-prone nephew, his boat-dwelling Palauan best friend, and an existential hitman with a surprisingly gentle touch.
The deeper Walt digs, the stranger, bloodier, and more spiritually unhinged things get, which eventually leads to him getting shot in the back of a Toyota Camry. Spoiler alert.
There’s quite a bit more to it than that, obviously, but this is just a synopsis. The book is slightly better.
One Should Never Die in the Back of a Toyota Camry And Other Important Lessons from the Island of Guam is set for a 2027 release through Fairly Adequate & Co.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ryan Gerber is the person who wrote this book. Yes, this book. He’s also the same person who more than likely sent you the link to this very site, which begs the obvious question, do you really need to read a bio about a guy you probably know, who’s already asking you to read his weird-ass book about ghost cats and dead uncles. And could he be any more starved for attention? Honestly. I mean really. But seriously, thanks for following. If by some tragic oversight of the algorithm, you actually don’t know who he is, he has other websites: ryangerber.com and fairlyadequate.com