Budding Prospects was published by Viking in 1984. Felix Nasmyth and two friends are recruited by a shadowy entrepreneur to grow a large marijuana crop on a remote property in Mendocino County, California. They imagine easy money and pastoral tranquility; what they get is backbreaking labor, paranoia, equipment failures, hostile locals, wildlife invasions, and escalating incompetence. The crop fails. Everything fails.
The novel is Boyle’s most purely comic: a sustained joke about American optimism and the fantasy of getting rich without real expertise or effort. The Northern California setting — beautiful, remote, populated by paranoid survivalists and burnt-out hippies — anticipates Boyle’s later engagement with environmental themes, but here the nature is primarily hostile rather than threatened.
The Cannabis Pastoral
The novel anticipates the legalisation era by three decades. Boyle’s marijuana farmers are not entrepreneurs in any modern sense — they are dreamers who imagine that growing a plant is easy. The comedy comes from the collision between fantasy and agriculture: nature does not cooperate, expertise cannot be improvised, and the criminal economy is as ruthless as any other.
Collecting Budding Prospects
First edition (Viking, New York, 1984): Boards with dust jacket.
Approximate market values:
- Fine in dust jacket: $75–$200
- Very good: $30–$75
Projected values (2026–2036): Moderate appreciation. Early Boyle first editions are increasingly sought-after.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Budding Prospects based on a true story? Not directly, but Boyle drew on the real culture of marijuana cultivation in Mendocino County, California, which was (and remains) one of the largest cannabis-growing regions in the United States. The novel captures the period’s paranoia and amateurism with documentary accuracy.