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THE OTHER END By John Shirley (Cemetery Dance; 2007)
If you ask me, this is just what we need right now: a sober, non-religious
(though unabashedly left-leaning) account of an apocalypse, specifically
conceived as an alternative to those fundamentalist “End Times” books
by Tim LaHaye and others--and by extension our current faith-based
leadership (President George W. Bush, FYI, is a fan of LaHaye’s work).
Another plus is author John Shirley returning to the type of
tripped-out metaphysical weirdness that typified his bizarro masterworks
SILICON EMBRACE and ...AND THE ANGEL WITH THE TELEVISION EYES, after
penning a ton of movie novelizations and series novels.
For a time I feared this peerlessly idiosyncratic author might be
going the way of his contemporary K.W. Jeter (who crafted some of the most
individual genre fiction of the eighties and nineties but now seems
permanently lost in the hack jungle)--THE OTHER END, thankfully, attests
that John Shirley is still doing what he does best.
The LaHaye books, for those who don’t know, are based on the
Christian concept of the Rapture, which decrees that prior to the
apocalypse all the True Believers (i.e.
right wing Christians) will be whisked off to Heaven, with the rest of us
left to fend for ourselves as the world falls into anarchy.
THE OTHER END, in addition to making clear that the idea of the
Rapture in fact appears nowhere in the Bible, depicts an apocalypse in
which progressive-minded people are taken away to a better reality, while
those who are “fundamentalist, hard-line, inflexible” get left behind.
But before that happens various assholes around the world--corrupt
CEOs, gangbangers, religious nuts of every stripe--are zapped by
“consciousness lamps” that show their misguided lives as they truly
are, thus inspiring them to change their evil ways.
There follows a wall of light that sweeps across the globe,
neutralizing the world’s most dangerous individuals...and then
occurs the alterna-rapture. Extraterrestrial
“programmers” have decided our planet needs to be rebooted, so to
speak, and have devised this particular apocalypse to set things right.
With a panoramic scope and a half dozen or so central characters
(along with cameos by President Bush, Osama Bin Laden and the
aforementioned Tim LaHaye, who all go unnamed), the book has an epic
thrust, but is still a fast, easy read.
The tone is disconcertingly cheerful, at least in contrast to much
of the author’s previous work. I
prefer my John Shirley books tough and nasty (the case with essentials
like CELLARS, WETBONES and THE VIEW FROM HELL), but THE OTHER END is so
much fun I can’t complain overmuch.
Watching the real bad guys of our world get their just desserts is gratifying, to
say the least; in his introduction the author claims the book at one time
might have been subtitled A WISTFUL DREAM, which does adequately sum up
the overall effect.
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