Mercury Falls [Paperback]

Robert Kroese (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 13, 2009

Years of covering the antics of End Times cults for The Banner, a religious news magazine, have left Christine Temetri not only jaded but seriously questioning her career choice. That is, until she meets Mercury, an anti-establishment angel who's frittering his time away whipping up batches of Rice Krispy Treats and perfecting his ping-pong backhand instead of doing his job: helping to orchestrate Armageddon. With the end near and angels and demons debating the finer political points of the Apocalypse, Christine and Mercury accidentally foil an attempt to assassinate one Karl Grissom, a thirty-seven-year-old film school dropout about to make his big break as the Antichrist. Now, to save the world, she must negotiate the byzantine bureaucracies of Heaven and Hell and convince the apathetic Mercury to take a stand, all the while putting up with the obnoxious mouth-breathing Antichrist.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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Amazon Exclusive: A Q&A with Robert Kroese

Question: What book has had the most significant impact on your life?

Robert Kroese: Saying "The Bible" is cheating, right?

I guess I’ll go with Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. That book provided the template for novels like Mercury Falls. Adams demonstrated that you could get away with putting your characters on a spaceship without ever describing what the spaceship looked like. Adams’s attitude was: "Okay, now they’re on a spaceship. You all know what a spaceship is, right? Good." And then he would move on to something really important, like a character’s quest for a good cup of tea.

Question: What is the worst lie you've ever told?

Robert Kroese: When I was maybe ten years old, I was up late reading when I was supposed to be in bed. I heard my mom coming down the hall toward my door and I knew I was going to be in big trouble if she caught me out of bed. So I flicked off the light, took two steps and dove headlong into bed. About a half second later, while the bedsprings were still creaking, my mom opened the door. I was lying diagonally on bed, spread-eagled on top of the bedspread as my mom peered in at me. Feeling the need to reassure my mother that everything was kosher, I blurted out, "I’M JUST SLEEPING THIS WAY!"

That was the worst lie I ever told.

Question: Describe the perfect writing environment.

Robert Kroese: A clean, well-lit place. With high-speed Internet access and MS Word.

Question: If you could write your own epitaph, what would it say?

Robert Kroese: "If you can read this, you’re too close."

Question: Who is the one person living or dead that you would like to have dinner with?

Robert Kroese: I think I’d really enjoy watching Woody Allen eat lobster.

Question: If you could have one superpower what would it be?

Robert Kroese: I’d like to be Super-taster, who can identify all the ingredients in any food he eats. "What is this, paprika? I knew it."

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--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

From Booklist

The Apocalypse is nigh in this whimsical, riotous debut. Christine Temetri, a freelancer for a popular religious news magazine, is tired of endless assignments covering cults incorrectly prophesizing the End of Days. When she talks her boss into giving her a better assignment, she doesn’t anticipate it will actually lead her back to a cult leader: the charismatic Galileo Mercury, who turns out not to be a cult leader at all, but a bona fide angel. Mercury is more interested in playing ping pong and drinking beer than he is in being involved in the upcoming Apocalypse. But when he and Christine escape a bit of divine retribution and end up saving the life of the Antichrist, a sulky gamer named Karl Grissom, they find themselves drawn into a miasma of heavenly intrigue and double-crossing. Lucifer himself is determined to find a loophole in the Apocalypse Accords, and Mercury and Christine are the only ones who can stop him. Clever, inventive, and original, Kroese’s hilarious romp has cult favorite written all over it. --Kristine Huntley --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 350 pages
• Publisher: St. Culain Press (July 13, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0578032147
• ISBN-13: 978-0578032146
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 0.8 x 6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (365 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,641,236 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Robert Kroese's sense of irony was honed growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan - home of the Amway Corporation and the Gerald R. Ford Museum, and the first city in the United States to fluoridate its water supply. In second grade, he wrote his first novel, the saga of Captain Bill and his spaceship Thee Eagle. This turned out to be the high point of his academic career. After barely graduating from Calvin College in 1992 with a philosophy degree, he was fired from a variety of jobs before moving to California, where he stumbled into software development. As this job required neither punctuality nor a sense of direction, he excelled at it. In 2009, he called upon his extensive knowledge of useless information and love of explosions to write his first novel, Mercury Falls. Since then, he has written two sequels, Mercury Rises (2011) and Mercury Rests (2012), and a humorous epic fantasy, Disenchanted.

Website: robertkroese.com
Facebook: facebook.com/robkroese
Twitter: twitter.com/robkroese

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

144 of 148 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Wickedly brilliant tale of Apocalyptic proportions October 19, 2009

By Justin G. TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

The end is nigh. The lawyers have reached an agreement, the paperwork is in order, the Antichrist has been named, and the Four Attache Cases of the Apocalypse have been unleashed. It's business as usual for the angels and demons involved, until things started to get just a little crazy.

The stakes are obviously very high in Robert Kroese's debut novel Mercury Falls. It's Apocalypse time, baby. At least it's supposed to be. The arrangements for the final battle between good and evil have been made, but various rebels and conspirators on both sides are doing their best to make the end of the world work for their own ends. The only real "free agents" are Christine, a human reporter assigned to the apocalyptic cult beat, and Mercury, a happy go lucky angel who'd rather be perfecting his ping-pong serve than keeping the end of the world at bay. Can this unlikely duo manage to thwart everyone's apocalyptic designs and keep them from, you know, annihilating the human race?

Not since Kevin Smith's Dogma has such a heavy theological concept been portrayed so hysterically. Actually, Mercury Falls reads a bit like Dogma if it were scripted by Christopher Moore or maybe Chuck Klosterman. Kroese balances his apocalyptic subject matter with razor sharp dialogue and abundant pop culture references that had me glued to the book with a big grin on my face the whole time...when I wasn't laughing out loud, of course. How many books can accomplish that? Whether holding forth on intraplanar mass transit and the heavenly bureaucracy or the best way to get red wine out of a cashmere sweater, Kroese's words flow in an absolutely compelling manner. Each sentence seems like an effortlessly constructed work of satirical genius that without a doubt requires additional reading(s).

Mercury Falls is self-published*, but don't let that deter you. The fact that a major publisher hasn't wised up to this book is a crime. This book was an absolute blast from start to finish, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to anyone who enjoys a good story and has a sense of humor.

*Update - Mercury Falls has since been picked up by Amazon as part of its Amazon Encore line. They obviously recognize a good book when they see it.

*Update 2 - The sequel to this book, titled Mercury Rises, is now available, and is well worth reading if you enjoyed this one.

79 of 82 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Thank you Robert! March 10, 2010

By Katherine

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

For a hilarious book! My brother is hospitalized with lymphoma and undergroing chemotherapy. To keep up his cognitive skills I read to him. Well he took over reading to me on most of this book and it had him laughing so hard he couldn't speak straight. It also brought his blood pressure down. Laughter IS the best medicine! Please keep writing!

71 of 76 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Spectacular October 12, 2009

By Peter Krogh

Format:Paperback

Recalling Christopher Moore at his drollest, and Eric Dezenhall at his most irreverent, Robert Kroese hits the nail squarely on the head. Some of the dialogue is so witty, so Wildean, that you think you must have read those jokes before, but you haven't. It's all original.

The first chapter does indeed recall Douglas Adams, but here Kroese falls down a bit. I can't help feel that he was edited into this voice for the first few pages, which is unfortunate because by the second and third chapters he starts rolling like a madman in a stolen tank.

Any concern that the narrative takes a backseat to pithy one-liners is quickly forgotten by the third or fourth chapter. The man can tell a story and will have you flipping pages well past "lights out."

The final chapter is quite upbeat, which is a tonal break with the rest of the story. Again, I felt an editor's hand at work and I hope that in Kroese's next effort he'll feel free to bookend his spectacular prose with intros and outros that are more fitting.

Highly recommend. We need more books like this.