The Quixotic Picaresque:

The True Story of the Incredible Green Knight

A novel in progress.

Donald Hoady is a high school student at the prestigious Galbraith School. Don is brilliant, arrogant, and lazy in equal parts, and devotes what energy he has to the pursuit of meaningless sex. His hopes for the future are not in school, but in his "friend" Peter Caro, an orphan and the only heir to the massive Cato fortune. When Peter gets full access to his parents' fortune at the age of 21, Don wants to be there at his side—and he doesn't want competition. Fortunately, Peter has always been more interested in comic books than in females. Until now.

The original Quijote and Sancho.

The startling revalation that Peter is interested in a girl named Donna Lawrence sends Don springing into action. With the help of his friend Pansy Sanchez, he convinces Peter to take his love of superhero comics one step further, by becoming a superhero himself. When Pansy, in the skintight PVC outfit of her supervillain alter ego, Black Lily, threatens to destroy Baltimore's City Hall with her "DestructoBeam", Peter is coaxed into donning the mask of the Green Knight and sallying forth to stop her, with Don (aka "The Mirror") as his supposedly loyal sidekick.

The novel is narrated by Don Hoady himself, an unreliable narrator if ever there was one. But even Don can't hide the fact that he's losing control of the situation, that he's falling for Pansy, and that his world is falling apart. The story is, on the surface, essentially a modern retelling of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quijote, but as time goes on, we realize that it's not at all straightforward who's filling which role. Is Don Hoady the picaro he seems to be, a backstabbing Sancho Panza manipulating Peter into becoming a modern Quijote, or is he rather playing the part of his namesake?