God is Keith

Read from Monday, April 4th to Tuesday, April 5th.

God is Dead, by Ron Currie, Jr.  Continuing on my God theme (culminating in the next post of The Stranger), this is a collection of short stories centering around a basic, creative and interesting premise: God has been killed.  Currie was the author of Everything Matters! and I wanted to check out some of his other work.  This was a pleasant, quick read, and it was his first work from early 2007.  Darkly comic, Currie has been compared to a young Vonnegut, which is a comparison that always piques my interest.

God starts the story by taking the form of a Sudanese woman caught in the civil war in the early 2000's.  She wanders around with a never-ending supply of food, quietly helping refugees.  She ends up at a refugee camp where Colin Powell is visiting.  While there, Powell has a change of heart and breaks with the administration.  He embraces his black roots, and vows not to leave until the government shows some good faith and helps find God's missing brother.  I thought the Colin Powell story was a little weak, and my least favorite part.  After Powell leaves, the Janjaweed bomb the camp, and God is killed. 

The world doesn't know this at first, but some feral dogs feed on the corpse and they start communicating telepathically.  The story of the dogs is told later in the book.  They try to make contact with humans, but one human betrays them to get the same power they have.  Most of the dogs are killed, but one survives and becomes a religious icon for the people of Africa, who are desperate for a new God to worship.  Eventually of course, the government of Sudan tries to squash this religious fervor and the dog is forced to flee. 

The world goes through many changes after the news that God has died.  At first there is chaos.  Power disappears, neighbors become murderers, and a group of teenagers make a suicide pack.  One by one they shoot each other, spurred on by a megalomaniac teen who has a thirst for blood.  One manages to survive, not because he backed out, but because he was last to go and his gun was out of bullets.  The world survives from that post-apocalyptic wasteland, and it morphs into a society where parents worship their children.  However, that too became dangerous as it was not a healthy love, but an obsession for many people.  The U.S. government gathers all the psychologists and requires every parent attend weekly meetings where they are taught how mediocre their kids actually are.  Thus begins the story of one psychiatrist in Maine.  He is hated by the entire community because of his job.  He has a secret affair with Selia, but when one father in town finds out and threatens to expose the relationship, the psychiatrist sacrifices his career and goes to jail in order to protect Selia. 

There are other short stories, and a few follow the lives of this psychiatrist and Selia.  America and the West adopt a Post Modern Anthropological world-view, in which every society is deemed equal and worthy to each other.  The Eastern countries adopt a position called Evolutionary Psychologist, which is basically only the strong shall survive and we must fight to prove it.  There is a huge World War, and Selia's teenage son Arnold feels pressure to join.  He doesn't want to feel left out from all the other kids, and he wants to impress his imaginary girlfriend (which all teenagers are required to worship in the absence of God).  However, joining the army would kill Selia and his father.  Arnold eventually leaves, and severs the relationship with his parents.  He spends many years in the Pacific, and Mexico, and finally retreats to America as the U.S. forces are almost wiped out.  He wants to reconnect with his parents, but his future is left unclear as he races home ahead of the invading troops. 

It was a very interesting portrayal of the future from a simple, though unrealistic event.  Currie has got a fascinating imagination.  Some parts took me out of the story and I didn't see them as being very plausible.  The thing about the child worshiping and Colin Powell were not that good.  But on the whole it was an enjoyable read.  Three and a half out of five stars.