Love in the Time of the Apocalypse

Description

Love in the Time of the Apocalypse is a really great genre busting novel about collapsing America without the somberness that usually implies. It is a work of playful conspiratorial pop-delirium and pastiche full of lovable eco-terrorists, state run breeding houses, Amish casinos, vulgar action scenes, the antichrist, tongue and cheek hyper-masculinity ("perhaps sit-ups can save the world") and a bourgeois love story to top it all. I hate to use the term Post-Modern to describe anything but those who do like to use it will use it to describe this book (but I still doubt they understand the term).It is, like the current state of civilization, part imminent nightmare part whimsical farce. While many books focus on the post-apocalypse, Love in the Time of the Apocalypse feels too close to the present, perhaps at times not more than a few weeks away, to fit snuggly with other end-time books(I liken it to some of the works of Philip K. Dick, especially the Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and A Scanner Darkly). It isn't standard Science Fiction either. America hasn't colonized Mars, aliens are little more than a plausible conspiracy, nor does the author go too far into the technical details of futuristic gadgetry like some of the hard SF you might read. Rather than rendering a sense of "future shock," the book left me with unease and caution about the present. Without coming across as a writer with an agenda, Gregory Blecha offers a strong but playful critique of State power, the inefficiency and corruption of bureaucracy, and the role of the over-stimulated, under-critical herd of middle class consumers and middle managers of a collapsing North America. Tramps, anarchists, plague victims, the Mormon underground, nihilists and nymphomaniacs along with the main character, a WASP drawn into their exciting world, make for the heroes of the story. The villains are the lifeless and systematic processes of the Federal Government, the Department of Health, the Department of Overpopulation, and the technological control systems of modern life, and yet even these are rendered with an air of playfulness that allows the reader to smile as the world comes crumbling down. Everyone should read this book. I couldn't put it down.

First Sentence

We were staying at the Amish, so of course there was no air conditioning.

Description

Gregory Blecha's rare fusion of brilliance, heart, and humor comes to life in this satirical novel that defies genre by simultaneously managing to be a moving and unadulterated love story. The narrative style evokes Kim Stanley Robinson's futuristic sci-fi classic Pacific Edge and its they-could-be-my-neighbors realism, as well as the headlong rush of The Da Vinci Code's opening chapters (a pace maintained here from beginning to end). Yet Blecha's voice is unequivocally his own. He captures human flaws and failings with bull's-eye farce but also with benevolence and hope. And his vision of the strange bedfellows in the United States' future is uniquely provocative - I may be laughing, but I'm also stocking my underground bunker. Love in the Time of the Apocalypse is dedicated in part to the author's late brother Bryan - also the name of the novel's hapless yet intrepid, indefatigable, and surprising protagonist. I can only imagine that the real Bryan would be proud to live on in his trouble-prone and endearing namesake who, even as the world plummets toward disaster, keeps on believing in the love that conquers all - including the apocalypse.

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