sdlotu
7/12/2024
A glib, sardonic look at the birth of a new child of god, female this time, still Jewish, but not quite so devoted to miracles and redemption as her older brother.
The first two parts of the story are mostly just sardonic mockeing of the clichés and stereotypes of both New Jersey life in the 1990s and Christian mythology as understood by people who are at best marginally Christian, or in the case of the new child of God, not Christian at all.
A long exposition of how to deal with being the daughter of God (God being female in this work) eventually ends with a cataclysmic 'death' of the god-child and a poorly explained trip into Hell to visit Satan, who has already been in touch with the child-god earlier in the story.
After a sardonic look at Dantean hell, complete with bureaucrats and Jesus, the god-child returns to life on Earth and finds the state of New Jersey has become a extreme, violent Christian nationalist prison state, somehow with the full acquiescence of the US government. The god-child, now middle aged, decides to fight this state even though the US will not, and ends up failing almost catastrophically.
The first two parts of the story are fun to read if you're into sardonic, glib, terse wit from so many characters, but fortunately the author abandons this in the third part for tired clichés and bizarre events. I for one would like to know how a full stick of dynamite could be close enough to someone to blow their hand completely off their arm, but at the same time do not a splinter's worth of damage to any other part of the victim or anyone near by.
But I'm not going to make an effort to find out.