Season of the Willies

This is not a review. A progress report, maybe. I'm almost done with Tony Hendra's new novel The Messiah of Morris Avenue, which I've enjoyed very much even though it gives me the willies.

TMMA was actually just released this month and Hendra himself was in town last week at Rainy Day Books. I didn't go and neither did you. For shame.

But anyway...

TMMA is set in a not too terribly distant future that could be just last week. Fundamentalists pretty much run the govt and the country with a Bible-thumping iron fist (that's the last week part) when rumors start to spread about a young Latino named Jose from the Bronx going around declaring himself to be Jesus Christ returned and performing miracles. A burnt-out jaded reporter goes out to investigate.

I'm about 40 pages from the end and it appears that Jose is meeting many of the same challenges as JC #1. (In fact, I'm sure Mel Gibson would like to film 10 particularly gruesome pages I read last night – but only those pages.)

There are problems with the book, such as an arbitrary switch from the first to third person on two occasions more than halfway through, done entirely to explain a particular strand of the plot. But it's a small price to pay for some good willies.

This is starting to sound a lot like a review. So sorry.

I don't usually read new novels, mostly because there are so many old novels I still haven't made it to, but TMMA just happened to arrive in my possession while I was finishing up the last book I read (another willie giver: Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer) and before I had decided on the next. It's a very tender point in any reader's life but somehow a book always manages to suggest itself.

Unfortunately, what seems to have suggested itself is a string of books religio-apocalyptic books with violent tendencies (go, Freud, go!).

Under the Banner of Heaven (subtitle "A Story of Violent Faith") is about, among other things, the Mormon religion and in particular two fundamentalist Mormon brothers to whom God "revealed" the necessity of murdering (aka, blood atonement) a sister-in-law who questioned their pursuit of polygamy and tax evasion. God also wanted her infant daughter dead, and now she is. If the brothers had met Jose, he would have told them that if God tells you to kill someone, you're probably not talking to God.

Amazon tells me that people who bought TMMA also purchased "American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century" by Kevin Phillips. Go figure. That title alone is willie-worthy.

Up next in my book stack: "The Man in the High Castle" by Philip K. Dick, an "alternative history" novel I've been meaning to get around to it for a couple of years now. There's apparently a big I-Ching element to it. We shall see. I can use a break from the fundamentalists, if only on the page.