Vietnam veteran Tommy Starbuck teaches high school English in a small town in southern Ohio. But his comfortable middle-class reality comes to a screeching halt when his wife abruptly leaves him for an old boyfriend. Starbuck becomes obsessed with reclaiming some semblance of a normal life, but fate-or some mischievous god-has other plans for him. A series of bizarre events causes him to question his sanity, the world's sanity. As he descends further into a surreal Season of Madness, he blasts an air-raid siren with a rifle on the date of his wedding anniversary. Myron Laszlo, an unkempt, long-haired giant, thrusts himself into Starbuck's life, viewing a bullet-riddled siren as radical and antiestablishment: 'Your act of seeming violence was in reality an act of love," he tells Starbuck who becomes his Hurdy Gurdy Man.
Almost as suddenly as he came into Starbuck's life, Laszlo departs, leaving a display of destruction in his wake. Saddened at the loss of his friend, Starbuck reprioritizes his life and begins working on a novel. After realizing that normalcy can have many interpretations, he decides to meet the seeming madness of Life head-on.