The narrator of this book, although blind, deaf, and paralyzed, interacts with a strange set of fictional characters who move about the fictional city of Nashville, Tennessee. A car salesman loves the smell of napalm in the morning. A sergeant pushes everyone out of his flying machine. A doctor finds two people living in the same body. A teacher forces a student to undergo an eyeball transplantation. A theologian claims that Jesus loves lesbians best of all. A cheerleader has a melon where her head should be. A pedophile exorcizes a demon. A minister fights evil by stabbing sinners to death. One man fathers a thousand children but his family does not show up for Sunday dinner. Real people mix with the fictional characters. Bob Hope holds the narrator's hand. James Earle Ray spends the night with a minister. Dinah Shore blows kisses and Jack Palance guns down a farmer. Kronos and his brothers move to Nashville to play football. Lamar Alexander digs up a coffin, pries open the lid, and shouts, "It's alive." Romance softens the gore. One character rejects Prince Charming while her brother falls deeply in love with a woman who does not exist. Two lovebirds pitch woo by drilling holes in each other's skulls. A grand denouement weaves all these storylines together in a beautiful tapestry, but the reader must avoid the splatter of bright red blood.
This is the best book written in English since Dante's Towering Inferno.
Professor, School of Letters, University of the South
This book is so complicated that it makes Tolstoy's War and Peace read like a Marvel comic book.
Henry Hammer, Department of Neurology, Gorrie School of Medicine
