[BRIEF NOTE] I have to read this

[rfmcdonald]

I briefly choked on my coffee this morning when, sittong on the subway, I read an article like this in my local edition of Metro about Ron Currie, Jr.'s new short story collection God is Dead.

Triumph of evil


The nightmarish satires of Ron Currie's God Is Dead have a scary ring of truth about them, says Michel Faber

Saturday July 28, 2007
The Guardian

God Is Dead by Ron Currie
Buy God Is Dead a the Guardian bookshop

God Is Dead
by Ron Currie
182pp, Picador, £12.99

In the first chapter of God Is Dead, God is, briefly, alive. He has taken on the form of a sick, wounded female refugee in Darfur. Apart from possessing a miraculously infinite bag of sorghum to share with her fellow sufferers, God's earthly incarnation has no divine aid to offer. In fact, "due to an implacable polytheistic bureaucracy", she is utterly powerless to influence the outcome of the Sudanese disaster and can only beg forgiveness for her impotence. Within days, God is a corpse on the battlefield.

It's a bold beginning to what is more a collection of short stories than a novel. (Four of the "chapters" were previously published as standalone pieces, and there is little continuity of character or plot.) The news of God's death triggers all sorts of bizarre upheavals in various nations, including mass looting, mass suicides and, finally, a war between the Evolutionary Psychologist Forces and the Postmodern Anthropologist Marines. Along the way, we meet a psychiatrist from the Child Adulation Prevention Agency, a conscience-stricken Colin Powell who calls George Bush a "silver-spoon master-of-the-universe motherfucker", and a talking dog.

The rather bleak premise makes me think that the above reviewer, Michel Faber, may well be right in proclaiming the collection a bit too nihilistic. Then again, Bookslut quite likes it, so "wait and see for myself" is probably the best strategy.