The Origin of the Brunists was Coover's earliest book and didn't have the hook of baseball-obsession present in his follow-up, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. or the controversial subject matter or styles of his later, better-known books. But in Brunists Coover provides an artful combination of the gritty account of a mining community, the fantastic imagining of a millenial cult rising from the reactions to a mining accident, and the madness so clearly embodied in the perfectly normal reactions that surround these events. A remarkable first novel, and one of my favorites ever.