Customer Reviews

Good News from Outer Space

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I first picked up my copy of this book off the shelf of some drugstore some years ago, and was utterly blown away by it. Full of weirdness, holier-than-thou mob frenzy, millienial fever, and even an alien, this Lewis Carroll-meets-Televangilism masterpiece kept me spellbound through the fourth and fifth readings. It is one of those that, while good the first time through, gets even better on subsequent reads.

I am warning you right now though, this book will be expensive for you. Why? Because you will be blown away by it, and you will make a friend read it. You will lend it to them, and never see it again. This is one of those books that will keep getting away from you until you break down and buy a copy to place in your secure book-vault.

This is a great book to read if you like dark social commentary, sharp wit, and stories about doom-sayers and doom-nayers. Kessel is able to capture the chaotic nature of apocalyptic events and make the reader feel as though the he or she has been absorbed into the scene. I would highly recommend this book to any avid sci-fi reader.

Written a decade prior to the dawning of the new millenium this story portrays a chaotic America that is breaking apart. It combines stories of societal chaos, religious nuts, and aliens but ultimately fell flat for a variety of reasons...

First, at the very heart of a good story is a central conflict around which the plot revolves. There didn't seem to be one here, or at least it wasn't very compelling to me as a reader (It would have been compelling if I'd cared about the characters, - more on that below).

Second, the representation of religious mania was so exaggerated that it could only have been entertaining if portrayed humorously, which it wasn't. The reverend was a way-over-the-top stereotype of those preachers on TV and his followers were cardboard "followers". No light was shed on the actual motivation of those in our society prone to religious delusions. These followers more or less believed whatever they were told and did whatever their leader said. Although it may seem that religious nuts in our society are this way, those who know much about real religious nuts can tell you that it's hard to get large numbers of them to agree on anything or follow any one particular leader. So what made these ones so pliable and easy to manipulate?

Thirdly, the characters were largely unsympathetic. Except for Lucy, they all were deranged and as a reader I felt that the world would be better off without them. And the protagonist spent the entire movie chasing aliens, yet we were only provided with the flimsiest explanation of why he was so obsessed with them or why he thought they were trying to take over the planet.

And lastly, the various plotlines were barely even resolved at the end of the book. Instead of a climax, there is an anti-climax which left me feeling like I had sort-of wasted my time reading the preceding 370 pages.

If it's possible for a book to take itself too seriously, this one did. If the book had been written in a zany, wacky, humorous tone instead of being dark, pessimistic and edgy it would have worked better, in my humble opinion.

If you like dark, vague conspiracy theories and edgy, improbable sci-fi you might like this. It's not a bad book, it just didn't work for me.

It is too bad that this book didn't get popularized in film or tv before the Millenium happened, as it is less likely to catch on now. This science fiction novel is actually a theological mystery. While a group of 80s style fundamentalists await the expected second coming of Christ (in a UFO, no less) the heroes discover that it may be already happening. People are encountering figures resembling significant people from their past, who confront their failings in ways that are sometimes judgmental and sometimes forgiving. Whether they are God or shape shifting aliens in a godlike role, the significant question is what meaning do they bring, if any, and will we be able to make sense of it? The result is a satisfying wrestle with these issues. It would be nice if this book got the attention it deserves.

Sure, this is a science fiction story of the end of the world, a genre I generally detest (but not as much as I detest =post=-apocalyptic novels) - but I couldn't resist. This novel is set in the two places I know best -- New York City and Raleigh, North Carolina. New York is more of an amorphous mass to deal with, location-wise, but Kessel gets Raleigh spot-on.

The camp awaiting Armageddon on Fayetteville Street Mall brings back memories of days when I was a student at North Carolina State University, strolling through the Brickyard, being yelled at by Rev. Birdsong, one of the many brickyard preachers. You see, it was immoral for me, lustful temptress, to wear shorts around such impressionable young men. Let's ignore for the moment that my shorts stopped at my knees. I found it amusing to think of a fire-and-brimstone preacher denouncing the godless people on Hillsborough, given that of all the UNC system schools, NCSU must be the most conservative (it is, after all, an engineering and agriculture school).

But I digress.

This is somewhat of a comic novel, and the characters really aren't fully-fleshed human beings. But this is a very fun read -- a very strange virus, a confusion (for me, at least) of identity, and some good news from... well, you know the title. Even if you're not from Raleigh, you'll have fun reading this book.

I read this book about ten years after it was published, and I gotta say that by then, the topic of millenarianism seemed to have been pretty much played out, in science fiction and elsewhere. But one should try and get past this mild source of annoyance when reading Kessel's book, because he does deal with the topic a lot better than most people did around the end of the twentieth century. The guy has a wonderful eye for human folly, and he's at his best when he seems to be depicting it hyperbolically until you think to yourself, "Wait...I KNOW some people (religious fanatics, trashy journalists, pathological liars, junkies, slobs) who really ARE this awful!"

The book is also interspersed with some very well-written and spooky passages in which a number of the characters seem to have encounters with aliens - or at least human beings who appear to be in the possession of some very strange powers and ideas. These episodes generate an enormous amount of expectation as the reader waits for Kessel to explain to us what the hell ties all of these events together...

..and he never does! The millennium arrives, the book ends. C'est tout. I'd give a lot of money to know what was going on in Kessel's head when he wrote the last thirty pages or so of this tome. But in spite of its formidable observational and stylistic virtues, the book left me kicking the furniture and cursing his name when I was done. Not a goal that the literary artist habitually aspires to, y'woulda thought.