Prophet Margin

Book excerpt: PROPHET MARGIN is a comedy about prophets, charlatans, reality shows, religion, social engineering, and the end of the world.Desperate to save his career, a producer, transforms an unassuming hipster into a celebrity prophet. But when he ignites a volatile mass religious movement he must hustle networks, mobster investors, zealots, and the NSA to keep his reality show alive.Not everything they say about Tommy Knox is true. Sure, Gender Wars was his reality show. Sure, one of the contestants butchered two competitors with an ax in a blind rage. But can you really pin all that on the Executive Producer? Yes, apparently you can. Though technically, he was exonerated. Not one to let a public disemboweling of his character get him down, Tommy is back from producer's jail to pitch a new show that will change the way people think of reality television forever. Religion. A whole new religion. After conning, extorting, and playing every angle to get a development deal, Tommy sets out to invent a religion from scratch. He finds Nava, an unassuming young hipster from Silverlake, and turns him into an online religious celebrity. Exploiting a bit of television magic, some mind-reading psychic tricks, and the viral rage of Internet culture, Tommy turns Nava into the first Prophet of the digital age. After a brutal showdown with a biggoted preacher, Nava becomes as famous as a Hollywood A-lister. Suddenly sponsors are clamoring to have a piece of the dark horse TV Prophet. However, Nava starts telling layered stories that provoke audiences to turn against the sponsors and their cultural masters. A power struggle ensues when Tommy tries to reign in Nava's preaching. A radical spiritualist movement sweeps across the country, and ignites a culture war between those who believe in Nava's miracles and those who dismiss them as nothing more than Hollywood chicanery. The two sides are divided by a thin line drawn in the sand, the PROPHET MARGIN.In the vein of Network, Wag the Dog, Being There, and The Truman Show, Prophet Margin is a comedy that explores the relationship between religion, entertainment, and politics.