God Is Dead

GOD IS DEAD BY RON CURRIE JR.: Ron Currie Jr. is a new author to the world of publishing, having had stories published in Glimmer Train, The Sun, Other Voices, and Night Train; God is Dead is his first novel. It is a slim book, only 180 pages long, with an unusual layout: the pages are taller than a regular hardcover, but narrower. With a haunting image on the front of a dog looking in a cage where there is another dog lying on its side, apparently dead; the package of God is Dead immediately catches one's eye. The title offers an obvious hint of what is to come in the novel. The book is split up into nine chapters that in some ways stand on their own as short stories. In the first God has taken the form of a young Dinka woman in the Sudan in the region of Darfur where she is injured and then killed. God is now dead and word begins to spread, soon enveloping the entire world in this doom. And so each story plays out a different part of the world, with distinctive characters, in different times. The second story is about a young girl who is now done with high school and wishes to sever all ties and connections with it, go to college in South Carolina, and pretend her past never happened. The story ends with the poignant scene of a priest committing suicide by jumping off a bridge. It is as a small and seemingly insignificant viewpoint that really speaks for the emotions and sensations that the rest of the world is going through. Religion and faith now seem pointless and so the novel goes from there into different peoples lives: boys who can't take the anarchy anymore and begin a group suicide; adults who turn their beliefs and faiths to children who are pure and innocent and seen as brilliant; a war between the post-modern anthropologists and the environmental psychologists that involves the entire world. Incredible story aside, Currie Jr. has a unique voice and a great talent for what he does, using a sharp and descriptive writing style that I will look forward to seeing again in his future novels. Ron Currie Jr. is a great new novelist to be watched, and God is Dead is a fantastic first novel that is more than an introduction to his imagination. For more reviews, please to go www.alexctelander.com.

I have no idea what theologians will think of this book, should they decide to read it. But, if it helps, this is not a book about religion. However, it is a book that's interested in religion...more specifically, it's interested in the people who find comfort in God and what their lives become when He is no longer around to hear their prayers. And yet, it's so much more than that. Currie's book is funny, smart, insightful and, above all, original. If this book has an agenda at all, it is more political than anything else...more specifically, it's about the people who find comfort in their government, even when it no longer listens to their prayers. But, even still, this book is no more about politics than it is religion. Really, this book is about people and the choices they make when faced with an absurd reality. And aren't those the best books to read, anyhow?

Like nothing I've read since early Vonnegut. Wonderful writing: fresh, elegant, and completely unpretentious. Currie laces his stories with both unbearable sorrow and acid humor, and every character--from God to hapless functionaries to talking dogs--feel so plainly human. Each story can stand alone, but they gather immense power in ensemble. I especially loved the way the various plots snipe at current events (wars fought over arbitrary ideologies, for example)without becoming the least bit polemical. This was a bracing read, and I plan to read it again, with a fuller appreciation of the stories' interconnection and long, intelligent arc. Bravo and thanks. -- Monica Wood

An intelligent, darkly humorous, often bleak, but ultimately hopeful book Ron Currie, Jr.'s debut "God Is Dead" is not to be missed. "I am not your God. Or if I am, I'm no God you can seek out for deliverance or explanation. I'm the kind of God who would eat you without compunction if I were hungry. You're as naked and alone in this world as you were before finding me. And so now the question becomes: Can you abide by this knowledge? Or will it destroy you, empty you out, make you a husk among husks?" So sayeth the last remaining member of the feral dogs who feasted on God's corpse after he had come to Earth as a Dinka woman only to die at the hands of the Janjuweed. For me the above quote sums up this brilliant book--a collection of stunning, provocative fiction all essentially asking the same question--what would happen if the world believed that God was dead? Would things fall apart? Would there be war? Would parents idolize their children? Would the dogs who ate God become false prophets? Would priests commit suicide? All ideas which Currie explores as he weaves together the godless world. But then maybe things wouldn't be so bad. That maybe life as we know it will carry on after all--like it always had--God or no God. In "False Idols", we learn this to be one reality: "And then a strange thing happened: nothing. Gradually we came to realize that the sun still rose in the morning and set at night, the tide still came in and went out on schedule, and we and everyone we knew (for the most part) were still alive and breathing. Talking heads and self-declared experts offered any number of theories, but the gist of it, intuited by most people, was this: God had created the universe and set it spinning, but it would continue chugging along despite the fact that he was no longer around to keep things tidy." The potential message then becomes: whether God is alive or not, hope is precarious--short in quantity and easily ditched for the more readily available despair. You may find comfort in God, but this comfort can never be 100% safe or fulfilling, for how do you know he is who he says he is? How do you know he will not turn on you and eat you? Basically: You don't know and you can't know. There is always a core choice to be made each day whether God lives or not and that choice is about getting out of bed and living a life in which the rising and setting of the sun is all you can count on is enough.

I don't think readers should over-examine this story collection/novel for its religious message, since the premise isn't theological -- it's just wildly imaginative. What if God manifested himself in Darfur in the body of a Dinka girl and died there? One answer is that the world, learning of God's death, spins out of control. But another is that God wasn't really doing anything to stop calamity in the first place, so what has changed? Our fate is in our own hands, just as it was before. You could make either case from these stories, if that's what you want to do, but in the meantime you could just enjoy these very well made fictions, from the title story, "God is Dead," in which Colin Powell visits the Sudan, to the last story, "Retreat," in which the outcome of a war between the armies of the Evolutionary Psychologists and the Postmodern Anthropologists is decided. The characters are quirky, but believable, trying to cope with situations that, only in the context of a world that has just learned of God's death, are wholly credible. This is a terrific debut and should find readers of all stripes.