The Novelty Empire

John Profunde is the founding visionary of Novelty, a company which has nurtured creative communities all over the United States and funneled their most remarkable talent into the Florencia, the freshly-completed Los Angeles site of Novelty's new headquarters. With the organization now gaining a dominant foothold on the entertainment media industry, and to transformational positive effect on the psychosocial state of the population, the future shines brightly for creators, for society, and for Novelty itself. But when disaster strikes at the Florencia's grand opening, an eagerly anticipated public event sychronized with local gatherings nationwide, and bolstered with Novelty's exclusive license to offer psilocybin (the psychoactive compound in magic mushrooms) to augment the experience, the company plummets into a state of crisis as the nation experiences a collective psychedelic nightmare. Desperate to figure out what went wrong, and troubled by the authorities' insistence that the event appears to have been a deliberate act of sabotage by insiders, John taps the Florencia's creative core, the community of "poets," for answers. Alongside emerging marital troubles, suspicion for his best friend and CEO of Novelty, Peter, as well as a small number of increasingly hostile citizens who decry the rise of what they have derisively nicknamed "The Novelty Empire," an ominous sense of foreboding begins to cloud his mind as he struggles to comprehend the formidable forces aligned against the dream he's only just begun to materialize.