Robert Lukens

A lot of the story is told through the lens of Carl, even when he's not necessarily the one speaking.

And his friend Baz, who I think it's apt to describe him as a sidekick.

An angry sidekick.

He's an angry sidekick.

He's a lot of things, Baz.

And so we've got this trio.

So we've got Carl, Baz and Tom, and they were childhood friends.

And as we said, at the end of high school, Tom decided to send himself off to become a war reporter.

The story travels between these different time periods between Carl and Baz and Tom in the present day, well, the later day Ireland.

where Tom is very seriously suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, just the repercussions of this time he spent in the siege of Sarajevo.

We see the three of them.

Tom's... The friends see him sort of at the end of a road where they're not quite sure what the next step will be, and they decide upon this last-ditch effort to take the three of them off to the US and take themselves to California to a...

slightly hippie experimental community that they've heard about where they can they have supposedly access to a kind of revolutionary approach to dealing with these kind of trauma issues and so the three of them set off for this story and as we go we are we're taken back to tom's time in sarajevo and we we see what unfolds for him

It absolutely does, and that's one of the driving factors of this story.

As I said before, it's this idea of ghosts, whether that be through trauma or through persons, and Gabriel exists in some sense almost as a literal ghost for Carl.

It shadows him through this whole story.

And the interesting thing about this story, and I think it's something that needs to be brought up quite early on, is that this story is billed as a combination of a comedy, a road trip story, and a tragedy.

Hang on, hang on.

Well, absolutely.

And that's...