It’s about time for characters who really kick ass. And only 20-book novelist T.C. Boyle, like the literary legends Terry Southern and Gary Indiana, can deliver folks like white-haired Nam vet Sten Stensen, 151 rum-guzzling Adam “Colter” Stensen, and big-chested horse keeper Lady Sara.

These are people whose minds, bodies and weapons are ready for the American Civil War right now. They’re not black or white, but Sovereign Citizens against a police state, Americans against propaganda, Americans against the Chinese and “the aliens.” Against anyone who trespasses. Because trespassers always do it again.

In today’s Southern California --- where Mexican drug dealers rape the land and judges enforce the taxing state --- there is no “turn the other cheek.” There’s only “what side are you on?” These people speak in questions and trust the government as much as a pickpocket Nazi.

What starts as a vacation to the brochure’s lies of hot, road-rutted Costa Rica becomes an international incident that finishes a family, the Stensens, who are already splintered. The number one and only son, Adam, suffers from a host of mental issues, living in a half-reality, a few seconds beyond trained help. The war hero, retired school principal Sten, suffers from aging at 70 and having little purpose in life.

"What grabs the reader, who cannot look away until the end, is Boyle’s use of action rather than story. The book is 400-plus pages of gunshots, knives, ridiculousness, ego, romance, madness, rebellion, loss, fear and, most of all, heart."

Then there’s The Lady Sara, who claims herself a Sovereign, a follower of the Fourth Amendment, not recognizing the state or police of California, who have charged her with the ungodly crime of “no seat belt.” Once, nothing, becomes the biggest deal ever.

What grabs the reader, who cannot look away until the end, is Boyle’s use of action rather than story. The book is 400-plus pages of gunshots, knives, ridiculousness, ego, romance, madness, rebellion, loss, fear and, most of all, heart. The heart that runs, bloody barefoot, through the rough and around the mysterious mountain of mental Babel. To climb and be haunted all the way, to challenge the authority; to enact violence out of pure and sexy animal L.O.V.E.

Female readers cannot resist Adam Stensen, the world’s first, only and final man. The melancholy master of past versus today, Boyle recalls Sten, faced with a vacation robbery, in his own Esquire magazine story of the 1990s, where an aging hippie meets a young beachfront pot-toker who, instead of ’60s sharing, simply says, “F*** you, mister.” Fighting a war in her mind, like Adam and his father, Lady Sara runs afoul of the law for pettiness that the courts treat as federal crimes. Two minds, hers and Adam’s, are primed for a meeting and making love.

THE HARDER THEY COME might have been better named “The Intensities” for the edge-of-the-seat your mind rents while experiencing Boyle’s latest. How can there be peace and love when we live in a world at war, eat or be eaten --- wildlife the same as our lives? Is evil winning? Adam thinks, “That was how it always turned out. For everybody on this planet. You could be made out of wood and they’d set you on fire. You could be made of steel and they’d hose you down till the rust got you… You just had to be hard as hard and make your own legend…”

Calling up names like the 1860s Colter, the 1990s Eric Robert Rudolph, conspirator Terry Nichols and bomber Timothy McVeigh --- men just trying to make the country safe for real Americans(!) --- Boyle gives his best in a state of mind that is anti-state at its absolute best.

Ah, Hemingway and Twain: the big two-hearted river is a lifestyle as much as the new age mountain man, the lawless man in a Patrick Henry-as-antihero novel. Once you get inside their heads, you may not get out unscathed.

Boyle on parboil, and if that isn’t enough, the author explains U.S.I.G.A. and properly uses the word “hemidemisemiquaver.” Which is nice. And hard. And too quick to anger.