Publisher's Synopsis
Saint John, a bipolar saint with multiple-personality disorder, and his sex-crazed pagan priestess, Helen, have quite a romance going on. Athenodorus, a perennially-single island-resort owner, finds himself hosting Helen and John as their erotic, religious and accidentally-political adventures ensue. The island's doctor, Pantheonus, a physician with a deep interest in psychology, tries to care for and analyze John, the poet, prophet and madman, as his life and fate drags everyone around him into deeper and deeper peril. The book is written in modern-day conversational motif, and, as was briefly a fashion in cinema, is written in a style that pretends not to notice many modern references occurring in a supposedly-ancient setting. Because of the book's heavy use of traumatic matters and dark subjects, it may be difficult for some readers to view the work as the comedy it really is. Further complicating things is the fact that the book is an unabashed effort to get other authors to work on creating a modern-day mythology to replace some of the now more hopelessly-irrelevant mythologies we've been stuck with. The book is written with cinema in mind and moves more like a movie than a novel. The possible dates of the scenes in this story are blurred to include possible comedic-revisionist allusions to such figures as Nero, Caligula, Augustus Caesar and Constantine. I deliberately refrain from saying whether the island where much of the action takes place is in Greece or Rome. (To push the date, time and continuity problems to the limit, I include a character from my other works who time travels between the modern United States and ancient Asia in order to carry on with his history-disrupting adventures.) The student of history and theology will notice my tacky use of precisely twenty-two chapters, the number of chapters in the actual Book of Revelations. In spite of these "lofty" considerations, the book steers clear of anything like goody-good-ism and fights, at every turn, to inject shock-value subjects and hair-raising horror so that the reader is never allowed to sink into any kind of bedtime-story certainty about any proposition, whether historical, philosophical or social. These effects are not so hard to achieve, since I am myself a continual border-crosser, moving myself from profound Agnosticism to credulous believerhood and back again. The work invites the reader to decide everything for themselves and seeks only to offer a wide array of confusing and unresolvable options.
