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God is dead. "Died and fell into the sea." That's what Raphael, a despondent angel with luminous white wings and a blinking halo, tells Anthony Van Horne on his fiftieth birthday.

Soon Van Horne is charged with captaining the supertanker Carpo Valparaiso (flying the colors of the Vatican) as it tows the two-mile-long corpse through the Atlantic toward the Arctic, in order to preserve Hime from sharks and decomposition. Van Horne must also contend with ecological guilt, a militant girlfriend, an estranged father, sabotage both natural and spiritual, a crew on (and sometimes past) the brink of mutiny, and greedy huksters of oil, condoms, and doubtful ideas.

As he rings his wild, Vonnegutian changes on everything from male chauvinism to the Catholic Church, James Morrow once again proves himeself to be one of the premier satirists of our time while still managing to capture some of the beauty and sorrow of the world. With Towing Jehova, the Denver Post declared, Morrow "solidifies his position as Christianity's Salman Rushdie, only funnier and more sacrilegious."

In this sequel to the award-winning "Towing Jehovah", the two-mile long body of God has become the main attraction at a theme park. But some want the figure transported to The International Court of Justice at the Hague, where it will be forced to account for the injustices and tragedies of history.

God's body has self-destructed and His skull is now in orbit directly above Times Square, prompting a plague of "death awareness" across the Western hemisphere.

The United States begins to resemble fourteenth-century Europe during the Black Death-with some unique twenty-first-century twists-a bloody battle on a New Jersey golf course between Jews and anti-Semites; a modern theater troupe's stirring dramatization of the Gilgamesh epic; a post-death debate between Martin Luther and Erasmus; and the most chilling capitalist villain ever, Dr. Adrian Lucido, founder of a new pagan church and inventor of a cure worse than any disease.

Two people fight to preserve life and sanity, Nora Burkhart, a schoolteacher who will stop at nothing to save her only son, and Gerard Korty, a brilliant sculptor struggling to create a masterwork that will heal the metaphysical wounds caused by God's abdication. The Eternal Footman brilliantly completes James Morrow's satiric trilogy begun with the World Fantasy Award-winning Towing Jehovah and continued in Blameless in Abaddon.