Writer/TV personality Tommy Garrett is nothing if not an optimist – as readers of the Canyon News have probably already surmised. While Garrett will occasionally throw down against the grain of Hollywood on these pages – he recently called the much-honored film No Country For Old Men ``one of the worst movies I have ever saw in my life” – he’s much more at home throwing bouquets at the hard-working folks who make up the worlds of news and entertainment.

          That’s why it’s easy to throw a few printed floral arrangements. Garrett’s way with the release of his fourth book Cosmic’s Adventure – and Garrett’s first foray into fiction. Garrett states in the book’s foreword that the total saga of an aged ne’er do well with the one-word moniker, who finds himself rising to the occasion while thrown into the most drastic of circumstances, is the first of a planned four-book anthology in which Cosmic’s quest is chronicled.

         Talk about optimism! Garrett took a chance by not wrapping his first non-fiction – and a sci-fi one at that! – tied to one tidy little story with a beginning, middle, and end. He’s betting that readers’ appetites will be whetted for future literary installments. Of course, Garrett has a track record to rely on – his previous books on the life of Joan Fontaine, as well as his one-two punch of So You Want To Be In Pictures, and The Making Of Hollywood Stars, thumbnail sketches of the world’s best-loved celebrities, were solid sellers. But that Garrett structured his non-fiction debut as a planned four-book series shows his belief in the story of Cosmic – and that readers will go along for the whole sleigh ride.

         I doubt I will be in the minority opinion to say you can punch my ticket.  Cosmic’s Adventure builds slowly with great attention to detail – die-hard gastronome Garrett lovingly details nearly every meal the book’s protagonist consumes – but ends with a cliffhanger that left me hoping the writer has already inked a contract for a second Cosmic installment.

          I’ll leave the blow-by-blow account of the book’s plot to other spoilsport scribes who give you more than you need to know in advance – but suffice to say Cosmic’s Adventure is a story of not only adventure but of courage. The book’s narrative, laid out simply enough to make the pages turn without having to re-read key paragraphs, lays out a mystery of a 70-something Cosmic – by the book’s cover, he looks like a shabby Santa (which to me, doesn’t seem unintentional) – who finds himself thrown into an incredible journey that not only tests his resolve and his faith in the Lord Above, but also finds that a hero lies within a decrepit man who had accomplished precious little in his small little life.

          The book begins as Cosmic, as he is known in his San Francisco neighborhood, is evicted by the small efficiency apartment where he lived his unremarkable life for some five decades. Alone and at odds with the world as he enters the twilight of his life, Cosmic uses his meager funds to buy a train ticket to Santa Fe as he hopes for little more than a roof over his head and a meager handyman’s job to sustain him. But even before he packs up, Cosmic is visited upon by a spirit past, who provides clues that his journey is bigger than just a forced relocation to a strange city. Indeed, Cosmic is visited by a ghost on his train ride to Santa Fe, and within a day of arriving at his new home, learns that San Francisco has been swallowed whole by the mother of all earthquakes.

           Cosmic lands his handyman job with the help of a kindly priest, but strange days indeed await the scruffy senior citizen. Shining, other-worldly lights fill the nighttime sky, eerie, haunting sounds emerge from a catacomb below his new home in a church rectory, and visions of earth’s apocalypse fill his head. And they aren’t bad dreams – as soon as the benevolent priest tells Cosmic he has a higher calling, and indeed a dramatic mission in his future, Cosmic learns that cities around the world are being eradicated from the map. The purpose of Cosmic’s mission unfolds steadily as he is given cryptic clues from the priest, from spirits and from animals who can take the shape of human form.

       For Cosmic, an un-extraordinary man thrown into the most extraordinary of circumstances, the power of prayer, and the belief in the kindly strangers who help him along on his journey, give him the inner strength to not only believe in his mission, but to see it through. The book ends just as Cosmic left his new hometown – and yes, Santa Fe meets the same fate as San Francisco – and arrives at the Grand Canyon to join forces with a mysterious Indian chief named Red Clay.

       I could fill in more blanks, but it’s more than enough to say Garrett turns a compelling tale. As a writer, Garrett is clearly influenced by his self-proclaimed childhood love for TV sci-fi such as Lost In Space and the Twilight Zone, and his adult fascination for the likes of The X Files and Lost. But readers will recognize the Tommy Garrett who penned the Hollywood tomes – his writing in Cosmic’s Adventure, while shrouded in the mystery he slowly unfolds, is marked by the clear, basic, but not overly simplistic style he employed in his non-fiction works.

       Truly, while Cosmic’s Adventure contains some truly descriptively scary moments, it doesn’t resort to vivid gore – and between the story and how Garrett employs his narrative, I can imagine parents would be able to read the book to their 7-year-olds. And they may be well-advised to do so – Cosmic’s Adventure contains a moral center, while not completely rooted in organized religion, which makes it as much uplifting as it is mysterious and goosebump-inducing.

          Garrett explains in his foreword that it was actually his agent who suggested he switch gears in his literary career to try a science fiction tome. Give that agent a raise! Garrett pulls off the transition with aplomb, crafting a tale that is a sure bet to ensure that the following book installments will see their way to bookstores – and into people’s hearts.

       Cosmic’s Adventure has allusions to America’s current war in it, but also carries a strong message about fear and how people can overcome it, and how truth and justice are far from just lip service words delivered by politicians. I think that’s a message we all could stand to consider a little further. Maybe Garrett’s optimism – even in the face of a sci-fi apocalypse – is something we could all use a little more of in our lives.

       A March 2008 release date is planned.

Roger Hitts, two-time United Press International columnist of the year, is a veteran celebrity journalist whose by-lines appear in numerous magazines and newspapers in the U.S. and around the world.