The Unicorn Girl- Michael Kurland's 1969 hippy, dippy, trippy novel featuring beautiful girls, a unicorn,, a magic hash pipe, Michael Kurland himself, Michael's friend Chester Anderson (author of The Butterfly Kid) and enough time between time and outer outer space travel to blow your mind, blow your mind again and blow your mind some more.
The Unicorn Girl - Book Two of the Greenwich Village Trilogy, bookended by Book One: Chester Anderson's The Butterfly Kid and Book Three: T. A. Waters' The Probability Pad. For those reader who might not be familiar with Chester's The Butterfly Kid, we have none other than Chester who wrote himself and Michael Kurland into the novel as leaders of a gaggle of horny hippies who save the world from giant blue alien lobsters by the use of psychedelics and mass hallucination. Ah, acid to the rescue! Not exactly Theodore Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis but it makes for one funky, fun story.
Turning to The Unicorn Girl here's the setup: A year following those phenomenal Greenwich Village butterfly events, narrator Michael Kurland is sitting at a table in the San Francisco Bay Area listening to Chester the Barefoot Anderson on stage playing his electric harpsichord with his new rock group when he spots her just inside the doorway - THE GIRL OF HIS DREAMS! Feeling like the knight in shinning armor from his boyhood days, Michael walks up the dark haired beauty and introduces himself; to which, the fair damsel in distress asks Michael if he would help here find her unicorn.
Cut to the parking lot outside where Michael aka Michael the Teddybear and his fair damsel Sylvia are joined by first Chester the Barefoot and then by a tall, slender knockout by the name of Dorothy and then finally by Ronald the centaur (no kidding, a real centaur!) and Giganto the cyclops (dido - a real cyclops!). Turns out these two beauties and two physical oddballs are from the circus and they are all looking for their lost unicorn Adolphus.
Two search parties are formed: Ronald and Giganto gallop off in one direction and Michael, Chester, Sylvia and Dorothy dawdle off in the other. No sooner does the quartet dawdle down the lane then Michael hears a weird meep meep along with spotting a blinking red light coming from what looks like one of those B-movie flying saucers. Than all of a sudden, as if from out of nowhere, there's an earthquakelike shaking BLIP and our four unicorn hunters are in a different space time continuum (big word I remember from high school physics class).
If Dorothy had a little doggie with her, she might have said the Bay Area version of: "Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore." So, Michael and the trio are in a post-BLIP land next to a yellow brick road where all sorts of In the Hall of the Mountain King happenings start to happen.
And this isn't the only BLIP - the story features four more - BLIP, BLIP, BLIP, BLIP - sprinkled throughout, BLIP-ing off at the hippest moments. Three soundtracks kept spinning in my mind's ear while reading: Love the One You're With, Puff, the Magic Dragon, and, of course, Here Comes the Sun. Dig it, baby.
Plot? Did I hear you say you wanted some words on plot? Impossible! No more on plot. Rather, let me share a few of my favorite HI points, if you know what I mean. Here they are:
Michael, Chester, Sylvia and Dorothy are ridding in a horse drawn carriage with a Victorian lady and gentleman - top hat, mustache, mutton chops, the whole get up. After ridding for a couple of hours with this prim and proper Vic couple, out in a grassy field, six buck naked couples frolic and romp in joyful abandon, laughing, squealing, running and tickling and hugging each other. Michael enjoys the sight but then it strikes him - the Victorian couple obviously fail to see the least itty-bitty bit of all that gleaming gorgeous flesh. Parallel universes, maybe? Turns out, nakedness means invisible to the denizens of this world they've entered. Comes in handy when Teddybear, Sylvia, Dorothy and the Barefoot One are chased through town by the Victorian townsfolk. Hey, as readers we get to picture Michael, Chester and those two curvaceous lovelies strip down to their birthday suits.
Walking along on a path in the woods, our four hippie adventurers (oh, yes, Sylvia and Dorothy have learned to toke with the best of them) are confronted by a gang of Spanish Conquistadors armed with swords and lances. Oh, no! Those brutes in armor want at the two beautiful ladies. A fight ensues. And who proves to be the most skilled warriors? Dorothy and Sylvia! Maybe those lovelies acquired their martial arts skills from the circus, but whatever it was, they are a sight to behold. When one Conquistador brings his sword up to defend himself, like a combination of lightning flash and jaguar leap, Sylvia swings into action, snapping her leg and fists out in rapid succession, hitting his belly, chest and finally his head with such force it instantly brakes his neck. More swirls, stabs and kicks (too fast to count) and those conquering Conquistadors are turned into corpses soon to be carrion for the turkey vultures. I hear Santana's Soul Sacrifice thumping away as background music.
Toward the end of their adventures, after the gang catches up with Tom aka T. A. Waters, author of The Probability Pad, we read one of Michael the Teddybear's last reflections: "The four days went fast. I don't remember much except getting yelled at a lot and not sleeping. When it was over, we had learned certain spells and methods that would be of most use to us. How to disappear. How to blip from one place to another (excuse the word blip). How to create and use a simulacrum if we got the chance. Things like that. Sylvia turned out to be the most apt pupil, Tom next, Dorothy next, then Chester and me."
What I want to know is: Why isn't this classic sixties novel reprinted so as to be made more available? Is anybody in the publishing world listening?
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