The Eternal Footman

Book excerpt: Can civilization survive the untimely demise of God? “A buoyant romp . . . superlatively intelligent and entertaining” (The Baltimore Sun). Completing the World Fantasy Award–winning author’s darkly comic trilogy, The Eternal Footman brings us into a future world in which God’s skull is in orbit, competing with the moon, and a plague of “death awareness” spreads across the Western hemisphere. As the United States sinks into apocalypse, two people fight to preserve life and sanity. One is Nora Burkhart, a schoolteacher who will stop at nothing to save her only son, Kevin. The other is the genius sculptor Gerard Korty, who struggles to create a masterwork that will heal the metaphysical wounds of the age. A few highlights: a bloody battle on a New Jersey golf course between Jews and anti-Semites; a theater troupe’s stirring dramatization of the Gilgamesh epic; and a debate between Martin Luther and Erasmus. And a chilling villain in the person of Dr. Adrian Lucido—founder of a new pagan church in Mexico, and inventor of a cure worse than any disease . . . “Morrow hilariously joins the ranks of the great satirists.” —The Denver Post “[An] insanely ingenious plot, reminiscent, variously, of B-science-fiction movies in the 1950s, Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, and Terry Southern at his most charmingly deranged.” —Kirkus Reviews “Any novel that springs from a sparkling intellect rather than a dreary neurosis is cause for celebration, and The Eternal Footman, with its load of truth and laughter, justifies a considerable quantity of champagne.” —Tom Robbins, New York Times–bestselling author of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues