Jehovah

This book examines the historic tensions between Jehovah’s Witnesses and government authorities, civic organisations, established churches and the broader public. Witnesses originated in the 1870s as small, loose-knit groups calling themselves Bible Students. Today, there are some eight million Witnesses worldwide, all actively engaged in evangelism under the direction of the Watch Tower Society.

Raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, Kyria Abrahams’s childhood was haunted by the knowledge that her neighbors and schoolmates were doomed to die in an imminent fiery catastrophe; that Smurfs were evil; that just about anything you could buy at a yard sale was infested by demons; and that Ouija boards—even if they were manufactured by Parker Brothers—were portals to hell.

Self-consciously styled after a hard-boiled detective novel, this is a most unusual and entertaining work of satirical SF. An assassin by trade, Dell Ammo works in a bombed-out section of Los Angeles that has been irradiated by a nuclear explosion. Terminally ill, Ammo is offered immortality by a millionaire evangelist if he will do one job: kill God. Accepting the assignment, Ammo embarks on a bizarre hunt through postnuclear L.A., assisted by Ann Perrine, a woman claiming to be an accountant but whose skills are considerably more interesting, and a nymphet with powerful, sexually telepathic abilities. In his search for God, Ammo encounters a powerful group of clerics eager to protect God, the source of their power, whether he exists or not. In other hands this could be pretentiously silly, but Koman carries it off with wit and energy