The Eternal Footman
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Can civilization survive the untimely demise of God? “A buoyant romp . . . superlatively intelligent and entertaining” (The Baltimore Sun).
Completing the World Fantasy Award–winning author’s darkly comic trilogy, The Eternal Footman brings us into a future world in which God’s skull is in orbit, competing with the moon, and a plague of “death awareness” spreads across the Western hemisphere. As the United States sinks into apocalypse, two people fight to preserve life and sanity. One is Nora Burkhart, a schoolteacher who will stop at nothing to save her only son, Kevin. The other is the genius sculptor Gerard Korty, who struggles to create a masterwork that will heal the metaphysical wounds of the age.
A few highlights: a bloody battle on a New Jersey golf course between Jews and anti-Semites; a theater troupe’s stirring dramatization of the Gilgamesh epic; and a debate between Martin Luther and Erasmus. And a chilling villain in the person of Dr. Adrian Lucido—founder of a new pagan church in Mexico, and inventor of a cure worse than any disease . . .
“Morrow hilariously joins the ranks of the great satirists.” —The Denver Post
“[An] insanely ingenious plot, reminiscent, variously, of B-science-fiction movies in the 1950s, Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, and Terry Southern at his most charmingly deranged.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Any novel that springs from a sparkling intellect rather than a dreary neurosis is cause for celebration, and The Eternal Footman, with its load of truth and laughter, justifies a considerable quantity of champagne.” —Tom Robbins, New York Times–bestselling author of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The third installment in Morrow's Godhead Trilogy (after Blameless in Abaddon and Towing Jehovah) returns the reader to a world that is perpetual witness to God's death as His Delaware-sized skull--the Cranium Dei--takes up residence in the sky. Society is beset with an apocalyptic plague; its victims "riddled with Nihilism... and malignant despair" as they progress through the four fatal stages of the disease. Each sufferer meets a personal "leveler"--a literate, ironic demon who heralds death and dwells in its host, materializing to impart jokes, warnings, inevitabilities. Morrow offers several heroes to bring hope to this grim world, including former schoolteacher Nora Burkhart, the recently widowed mother of Kevin. Struggling to give her cerebral son a good life, she is soon faced with the arrival of Kevin's leveler, a being called Quincy Azrael. Gerard Korty, meanwhile, is a renowned, reclusive sculptor who lives cloistered with his wife on the Indonesian coast and is commissioned by the Vatican to create God's reliquary. And Captain Anthony Van Horne is the infamous oil tanker captain who's given the task of transporting the Corpus Dei to Rome. These characters' paths converge in the jungles of Coatzacoalcos, site of a unique scientific-religious institution called Somatocism, which promises a cure for the plague. Breathlessly taking on a multitude of absurdities, musings and challenges, the author and his roaming imagination--like a plague victim and his leveler--are stationed everywhere along the dense, occasionally bloated story's path, equally ready to debunk and apotheosize. Reminiscent of Swift, Vonnegut and Ayn Rand, Morrow comes off here as ambitious, observant and earnest. A respected satirist and tirelessly resourceful appropriator of the conventions of SF, he may not secure legions of new followers with this novel, but his devotees won't be disappointed.
