Another reason I miss bookstores is stumbling across gems in the way I did this one, Jim Knipfel’s funny and bizarre (and at times, poignant) The Buzzing. Though I’d never heard of Knipfel, any book with Godzilla on the cover is going to get my attention.

What I remember of the plot is that Roscoe Baragon, a once respected and award-winning journalist, has fallen so far that he now covers the “kook beat" for a New York newspaper. That means he’s used to taking phone calls from crazy people, schizophrenics and bipolar and the like, and digging into all kinds of strange happenings. Of course, most of them don’t pan out, but Baragon is a dogged reporter and he’ll follow up on anything.

Throw in a bizarre phone call from Barrow, Alaska, homeless people going missing, his medical examiner girlfriend reporting that one of the bodies in the morgue had set off their radiation detector, a nuclear submarine sinking a Japanese fishing boat, and an earthquake off . . . Barrow, Alaska! . . . then Baragon is either going as crazy as his tipsters, or he’s somehow managed to stumble onto the biggest story of his life.

What I remember liking very much about this book was it capturing perfectly an old school reporter watching everyone in the newsroom (including his bosses) getting younger and younger than him. A long time smoker finding it harder and harder to find places to smoke. Baragon’s obsession with Japanese monster movies of the sixties. And the relationship between Baragon and his girlfriend, who dances by herself, and may (or may not!) be in on the plot (if there is one!)

I know the book isn’t for everyone, but I enjoyed the hell out of it. Funny thing too, I remember not long after reading it, seeing dozens of copies in the remainder bin, and being both disappointed and curious about that. So, I did some Googling.

I didn’t know this while reading it, but Knipfel (though far younger than Baragon) had been a longtime journalist himself. He’d also famously suffered with losing his vision and had written a very well received memoir about that. So, whether this, his first work of fiction, was just too far afield for either his newspaper or memoir readers to follow, I don’t know.

All I know is, you ever want to read something that might have been created by a collaboration of Kurt Vonnegut and Philip K. Dick while both were high on mushrooms, you could do a lot worse than The Buzzing. ( )