Ray Blackston, Pagan's Nightmare

Pagan's Nightmare

Ray Blackston

Warner, October 2006, $22.99

ISBN: 0446579599

Novelist Larry Hutch has written a manuscript with an odd promise, in which the rapture has occurred, but left behind to live on earth are two groups. The vast majority are firm believing Christians, praying for deliverance while they lump the occasional backward thinking non-believing moron as a pagan. The Evangelists own the economy, and therefore the country. Those who are not card-carrying Christians are treated like second class citizens who have few rights since they are outside the Jesus' club. Thus gas for the faithful is twelve disciples, make those cents a gallon, while the pagans pay $6.66.

Larry's beleaguered and financially broke hero Lanny Hooch, a true non-believer, seeks his vanished girlfriend who may have been raptured to heaven. While he walks the holy streets of Atlanta searching for his beloved, he also would like to buy Mc-French-fries not "McScriptures", though as a documented pagan he probably cannot afford the usury rates regardless of the name. Meanwhile, Larry the author has no problem finding people, not only willing to read his reverse parable, but everyone who does is enraptured by it.

The novel rotates between Larry giving his book to people to read and Lanny struggling to survive as an outsider in a fundamentalist Christian ocean. The Lanny segue is fun satire that uses irony to make case that there is plenty of room for everyone inside God's tent. However, the Larry segment feels intrusive, as the audience will be FLABBERGASTED how easily he hooks people to read his thriller. Still, overall this is a humorous allegory that pokes fun at exclusive extremism, using metaphors of everyday life to paint the absurdity of claiming to be the only one to understand Gods words.