A Wake-Up Call
July 23, 2010Henry Baum 3 Comments »Just received an email from a reader saying that he wanted to put his review of my novel up on Amazon, but he chose not to, so as to not alienate potential readers of his own books. So I’m posting it here. He titled it “A Wake-Up Call.”
If you’re not a death-cult end-of-days fundamentalist but notice that they’re increasingly and bombastically in our midst, you will easily buy into the terror that informs Henry Baum’s contemplation on the near future suicide/genocide they would like to spring on the world. Done up as a dystopian time-travel apocalyptic dream-state genre-busting journey narrated by a failed novelist and perennial victim who ultimately controls the destiny of the few tens of thousands of survivors of the death cult’s Armageddon, Baum’s compelling work gives eerie voice to what a growing number of Americans must be feeling when they notice that politics and government are being frozen in place and wrested from all other hands by conmen and nutbags posing as the only true Christians. The American Book of the Dead is a wake-up call. It’s good fiction and it’s fun and it seems over the top. But ultimately it describes a plausible end-of-days scenario should the shrinking shadow of effective government and the public commons fall completely to those whose rocket ride to Paradise takes precedence over all that humans can know for a certainty and thus hold dear in this life.
One of the reasons I didn’t send the book to my agent and chose to self-publish was because I knew traditional publishers would be made uncomfortable by the premise – thinking that it’s anti-Christian, when it’s not. It’s anti-Palin Christianity. It’s anti-fundamentalism of the type who says that Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to set up shop in New York City b/c people in the “heartland” are against it.
Heartland, Uber Alles. The American Taliban. The constitution-spouting “patriots” are fundamentally un-American. There’s a strange and insane irony that the anti-Mosque activists are the same as strict Islamists who protest pictures of Mohammed. This country’s built on freedom of press and religion.
Anyway, publishers don’t take a lot of chances – even if the 70-million selling Left Behind series needs a counter, and maybe there are people out there who want to read that too. Strangely though, reviewers so far haven’t focused on my take on fundamentalist Christianity, focusing instead on the dream aspect, meta-fiction, or general dystopian themes. So I’m glad to have this review.
July 24th, 2010 at 4:39 am
A good review I think. To me the book was all entertainment though. I felt like I was close to Eugene and was sometimes worried and sometimes slightly irritated by him. That makes sense since college proffesors and teachers are not my idea of fun people (along with people who are supposedly fun!) but that’s what makes Eugenes journey so compelling. He is awkward. But I read the book without awkwardness in three sittings whilst drinking Ale in pubs. I dont know why the pub setting, but this made the book alot of fun as well! The contrast….The apocolyptics were fun. That sort of ‘what would I do?’ aspect. Emptying supermarkets must be sightly fun if your a survivor. Guilt is fun. Pain can even be fun in a community of millions who dont know how to communicate with each other (I gather America is similar to England in this manner…especially Hollywood and London)
As with most great books it would be the small things and the particles of nuance that attract me. The setting could be care bear world for all I care…..Just a great book.
I think that chaps review would be good on Amazon. Why not?
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July 26th, 2010 at 9:02 am
I don’t see posting this review as that big a deal either. But if he’s worried about posting this paragraph, I’m totally fucked for having written the entire book. If I was ever to be really successful, fundamentalist Christian dementors might start getting scary. I wonder what sort of security Dan Brown has on his house.
July 26th, 2010 at 10:10 am
A glint on a lake glitters into a small spiral….The shape of RW Hedges in combat ninja westsuit rises from its depths and slowly edges toward the security fence at the back of a tasteless pink mansion. Wires cut, RW scales the walls that have silly emblems of cheap templaresque symbols jutting from them. Using these as hoists RW manages to deface them and slips through a careless open window. Dan Brown is startled and drops his Xbox control, goes for a silly plastic sword he has above the fire-place (given him by a very dim witted fan from Japan)…
Dans body slips into two neat halves as a razor sharp blade smoothly taps the floor….He should never have written those books….And he had thought it would be the fundamentalists….His half a sad face shocked and bloody began to leak the rest of his boring unwritten books onto the ninja shoes of RW who laughed like a cat…etc….