Published in 2008 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,[1] the major themes of the book revolve around the Jungian concept of synchronicity, chaos theory, and the Butterfly Effect.
What emerged was an exploration of the Butterfly Effect, as what initially appears to be a chaotic storyline eventually relents into a tightly-interconnected series of events linked across time, space, and meaning.
Elizabeth eventually meets Diablo, who has been selling seashell pipes on Bourbon Street for the last fifteen years, ever since he quit his job and Billy Pronto began haunting him.
New Orleans, still raw from Hurricane Katrina years back, flees its path, but the world is soon startled to discover that this anomalous hypercane is not moving, taking up an apparently stable position in the Gulf.
This hypercane is the latest incarnation of the tornado initially spun from Diablo’s playing card, which had been a dust devil in the Rub al-Khali gradually dissipating into nothing before the thermonuclear explosion caused it to grow in strength.
Woven throughout the larger story is Clovis, runaway serf from the 9th century who stumbles upon the mythical Golden Bough, a scene which Bridget Snapdragon happened to paint on the kitchen wall while pregnant with Elizabeth.