"Don't relinquish your responsibility to a god or a devil. Instead, take it and use it to add meaning to your life; don't assign it to anybody else."
Athanasios' "Mad Gods" is an ambitious, ambiguous, and revelatory look at modern faith and the well-worn story of the antichrist that goes places that most such stories fear to tread. What if somebody told you that not only are Satanists and the Catholic Church working towards the same political ends, but that all religions are really one, Satan was merely an aspect of God himself, and the antichrist is just Jesus on a bad day? If you didn't just jump out of your chair crossing yourself and cursing me as a messenger of the devil, then "Predatory Ethics" may be a series you'll want to check out.
The theme of this story of a (potential) antichrist who is taken and hidden from those who seek to destroy him or use him for their own ends is of individual choice and responsibility. The rebellious agent Kosta is charged with proving to the world that all religions are as one and should be working together to further mankind, and his avenue of attack is
the most high-stakes "nature vs. nurture" experiment in human history. Freed from the constraints and expectations placed on him by any church or political power and instead raised as a normal child with compassion and decency, could a supernaturally-empowered boy prophesied to be the son of Satan and end the world instead choose a different path and become a new messiah? A lot of powers in the human world don't want to find out and will go to great lengths to have their own way with the chosen one.
Full of challenging philosophies ingrained into a multi-layered story that spans centuries, Mad Gods is indeed an interesting exploration of the way mankind corrupts the word of God for his own ends. But the story is somewhat inconsistently written at times and jumps around a lot with one chapter taking place with the lead character setting spirits to rest in Istanbul (not Constantinople) while the author gives us Dora the Explorer style Greek lessons, and another dealing with a guy getting an impromptu double-bj from a man and woman in an alley in more detail than was really necessary, then off to the Catholic authorities for an apocryphal history lesson, and perhaps then going back a few hundred years for some past life perspective before hopping back to the sixties to discuss The Beatles and Stanley Kubrick for a while. The result is somewhat jumbled at times and generates a bit of inconsistency in tone. The tangential preoccupations with 60's popular culture occasionally get in the way of the narrative as it takes it over entirely for chapters at a time and interrupts the flow of the story too often in the second half of the book, but overall the ambition and strong philosophical base of Mad Gods more than makes up for any shortcomings in pacing.
Predatory Ethics appears to be a series with places to go. The premise is a fascinating one worthy of exploration, and any open-minded reader looking for a different take on the classic antichrist story should find a lot to mentally digest in this first book. One definitely wonders where Athanasios is going to take this story from here, but rest assured, it's going to challenge your preconceptions and make you think.
