Michael James Cannon

Unyielding Michael James Cannon

Unyielding is like the tone of Deliverance, without the ragging river, with the forbidding desert. A desperate young, man stripped of everything except his pride, is hunted like a wild animal in an unforgiving desert by a meaner-than-a-junkyard-dog sociopath. "Well big boy... this is reckoning day for all the misery you've caused me!" The malevolent man says, spitting at him, and pointing a high-powered rifle towards the twenty-five year old Shyne. The young man is a Jason Bourne type, with too much testosterone and too little patience for his own good. So begins the perverted game on which Shyne's life is put to stake, in an ungodly hot southwest desert. "You are the deer," he's instructed, "and I am the hunter." Shyne, given an hour head start, hurries through the rock-strewn desert mountains, his bare feet cut and bleeding, the intense heat bearing down on his naked back. As the predator's web tightens and a quick deadly decision is needed, a mysterious coyote, sporting a pure white tail, seems to be showing a safer way. But why? Each horrible day, he sees things that make him daydream about his past... The random things turn up at desperate times, including: airplane contrails, snakes, broken bottles, an old Frisbee, mirages, a barrow cactus, coyote shit, etc. The Daymare Believer is born! But all of his contemplations only offer him a short respite, from this real life nightmare and then it's back again to his awful reality. The Daymares are woven between horrific hours of just staying alive: After many days of sweltering torture, Shyne is lead by the little coyote, to a place where he must bury himself alive to survive. In the end, a combination of his predator's greed and possible divine intervention saves Shyne's life.