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The Commandment
Ten years ago, Briar's body rejected a government mandated vaccine known as SAP (Serum to Advance Progressivism), formulated to erase God from the mind. Briar was seven years old. She's been on house arrest ever since. Now, just weeks from becoming a legal adult, Briar remains non-responsive to her mandatory SAP injections. Along with her rapidly approaching eighteenth birthday looms a grim by order of the Commandment, adulthood means institutionalization for those resistant to SAP. In a matter of days, Briar will become a permanent resident of the ARC--a facility shrouded in dark rumors of torture, experimentation, and death. Her only alternative is to accept a last minute ultimatum to become a laboratory test subject for a new God-dissolving serum. With a decade of solitude behind her and a lifetime of confinement before her--what does she have to lose? Except maybe her soul.
175 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 24, 2018
1 person is currently reading
10 people want to read
About the author
Anna Kittrell
11 books17 followersAnna Kittrell has written stories for as long as she can remember. She still has most of her tattered creations--leftovers she was unable to sell on the playground for a dime--written in childish handwriting on notebook paper, bound with too many staples. Her love of storytelling has grown throughout the years, and she is thrilled her tales are now worth more than ten cents.
Growing up in an Oklahoma small town, Anna spent many a summer day on the lakeshores she often writes about. Today, she works as a middle school secretary in her beloved home town, where she resides with her high school sweetheart-turned-husband, Tim, and their two practically grown children, Evan and Brandilyn. She still loves visiting those muddy red lakeshores of her childhood, when she's not too busy writing about them instead.
Growing up in an Oklahoma small town, Anna spent many a summer day on the lakeshores she often writes about. Today, she works as a middle school secretary in her beloved home town, where she resides with her high school sweetheart-turned-husband, Tim, and their two practically grown children, Evan and Brandilyn. She still loves visiting those muddy red lakeshores of her childhood, when she's not too busy writing about them instead.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
March 27, 2023
The Commandment By Anna Kitrell is weird. Or. Sorry. Looking at the cover, The Command………… Ment is weird.
Yes, this is a Christian book about a vaccine that kills god. I don’t have a lot more to say as an introduction than that. A long time ago I saw this book on Netgalley and saved it because the kerning on the cover was funny- and years later I realized it was a crime I hadn’t read the actual book. This is the kind of hidden treasure I’m all about. I love all the classic bad books we all know, sure, but no one has ever talked about The Commandment by Anna Kitrell but me. That’s incredible. I’m so proud to be breaking this story of hot air balloons and Godzones and all the unhinged story beats set in what appears to be a society greatly improved by removing God.
Part of him wished he and Briar could find a place like that. A little corner where they could stay together forever, hidden from view. A secret, safe haven where he wasn’t responsible for killing the God she loved so much.
174
----- You can read my full review here! Which has a link to me covering it on my youtube as well. It's too long for GoodReads!-----
Plo- I mean premise
In 2050, God is dead and we have killed him. Huzzah! The Commandment, it ought to be clear, is a very Christian book from a Christian press, a demographic category I wouldn’t read if not for the weird science aspect this book tries to pull. And pull it it does! About ten years ago, our main character’s dad invented the infamous vaccine against god. In 2025 (so soon), the American government determined there was no need for Christianity and that Christianity was in fact harmful. American society had decided Christians were the biggest threat to peace, what with their hatred of gay people, abortion, trans people, and constant insistence everyone was going to Hell. Thus, the government commissioned a man to invent a way to end Christians via a vaccine called SAP (Serum to Advance Progressivism). And so peace reigned!
Okay, this is only the first hurdle of worldbuilding, but let’s quickly review it. This book was published in 2018 crucially and felt that only seven years after it was published it would be plausible to imagine America persecuting Christianity to the degree that the gov would murder god. America is, of course, a majority Christian country that still has very Christian traditions built into the government on every level. The book reflects a certain persecution fantasy conservative Christians in America do hold, but Christianity is not under any threat. We have to buy this premise to buy the rest of the book, but it’s so weird to read lengthy explanations of how the United States government will soon view Christianity as a religion of terrorists that must be suppressed in the name of ‘Progressivism’… Though, obviously, this is the exact viewpoint many do have right now. As mentioned, one of the few explanations for why the government would turn so drastically against Christianity is simply human rights. It’s never dug into, but vaguely, gay people exist and need equal rights, and that is the reason Christians are oppressed. Hm Hmmm.
Anyway, SAP is the anti-god vaccine, and it’s not… actually a vaccine. There are so many fascinating ideas in this book, both things you could steal to write a baller novel or just bizarre implications and accidental gaps of knowledge laid too bare. Every human has ‘Agathi’ in their brains in this book, small thorn-like clusters of apparently useless tissue. Science has deemed them useless, like wisdom teeth or an appendix, vestigial mysteries that can even actively harm people who have them. Agathi are described as a mystery, but later in the book, we learn they are far from unknowable: they light up on scans when people interact with the Christian god in any way. Though there’s no ‘benefit’, to paint them as useless brain bits is bizarre. They clearly react to stimuli in a very specific, replicable way! We need to study these suckers. No wonder they’re also called ‘Godzones.’ And yes, Agathi means thorn-shapped, and yes, it’s a crown of thorns hehehe get it.
And yes, Christian God is a deliberate term. This book coyly flirts with admitting other religions are real but never does. A few times there’s an odd sentence that says ‘Christian God’, an odd reminder of the fact this is set in our reality. A bible verse is mentioned that has the word ‘Jews’. But the implications of other religions simply are left unsaid. Are we meant to presume Christians are so oppressed only they got banned, and Muslims are still happily practising? The notion Agathi only work to the Christian God is explicit: they don’t light up to religion in general. This is thus proof of god literally in the flesh. But… wait. Christians don’t even agree on what god is like among themselves.
“The job of the hippocampus with help from the frontal cortex, is to analyze sensory input and decide what’s important enough to remember. Information deemed worthy ends up in long term memory, which is stored in different parts of the brain. The exact reason the Agathus stores information exclusive to the Christian religion has yet to be determined. Despite millions of dollars exhausted on countless studies, the cause remains a mystery.”
58
See, here’s the thing about having secret god holes in everyone’s minds that the Christian God likes to hide in: It gives a concrete method of testing what god likes and dislikes. The way it is described the Agathi respond to thinking of god, choral music, that sort of thing, with varying intensity. As much as it might be per person and per mood, it also is only Christian. I think this means we can finally solve The Great Schism! Have someone watch something on saints. See if the Agathi lights up. Let’s see who’s canon and who isn’t. Put a Mormon in a scan and see if you can’t end that whole thing. In trying to write in scientific evidence that Christianity is the only true religion, the author has accidentally created a horrifying game of asking questions until we learn the exact nature of god based on what lights up his favourite brain spot.
Other religions still press a very specific problem, too, because the Christian God is sort of a timeshare situation. With the number of sects and splits Christianity has it can be debated if there really is one unifying idea of a Christian God to begin with, but we also all know, hopefully, that Christianity is an Abrahamic religion, and shares quite a bit of canon with other religions. The old testament, in particular: the mark of Christianity is Jesus Christ of course, but all that before stuff is still very important… and shared in various portions with Judaism and Islam. This raises some really odd questions. If we scanned a Jewish person thinking about God, would it raise the Agathi’s alarm? The book says no. But what about if it was specifically a section of religious text shared by both religions? Do the Agathi know to differentiate between thinking of god in the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ way? If they do, surely this is more proof god is real and that god is Christian- all of humanity being born with a section of the brain that responds purely to Christian things is proof!
It gets more bizarre as an implication though when you consider history. The thesis of this book is that the Christian god made humanity and made the Agathi to store Godliness in. What happened before Jesus, though? Christianity is still Christianity even when studying the old testament, but the biggest definition of Christianity still depends on a belief in Jesus. Was… humanity made with Agathi that did nothing until Jesus was born? Did Jesus have Agathi? Or did the Agathi respond to old testament stuff in a bible that had yet to be written, knowing somehow what would later be Jewish-only beliefs? Did God put the Agathi in humanity only after Jesus died?
See how fascinating this is? I’m totally distracted from explaining the plot. I would never just pick up a Christian book and scoff at it for being Christian because that doesn’t interest me. Christians… you are valid! I know, I’m so brave, speaking up for the most oppressed demographic on Earth like this, but sarcasm aside, I always try to draw a clear line between making fun of a bad book with weird ideas and just the notion of religion and Christianity. There’s nothing actually wrong with any of that or any religion as a base idea. I’m not interested in picking up a book for a demographic I don’t belong to and reading it just to hate on that demographic, and I’m not interested in reading books that would simply offend or annoy me, nothing else. What fascinates me about The Commandment, and why I picked it up, is because of how strange it is. Science and religion can very much go hand in hand, but this book takes such bold steps to clearly define religion through science and then cowers away from confronting that.
Consider, I mean, a God Vaccine: It’s so ludicrously delicious as an idea. A vaccine after all is typically made of dead or alive cells of the thing you are fighting. By calling it (wrongly) a vaccine, the book implies someone found god and stole his cells. That’s amazing. I want to read about that. Someone found God’s corpse and Christianity is able to be fought like a disease. What? As a lot of people point out when I bring up this book, the whole thing is oddly dismissive of god himself. It implies a world where an all-powerful god can be vaccinated against like the flu. The premise, which I’ll get to, even has a lead who is immune to the god-vaccine, positing the idea God is like a sneaky weasel who climbs into your Godzone to hide unless you wall it up with SAP. At one point the lead imagines god as a shriveled-up corpse in her head, dying in her godzones.
Briar squeezed her eyes shut and concentrated on the quickening. It was no use, she couldn’t feel anything. If she really tried, she thought she might sense what used to be the Holy Spirit, dried and shriveled inside her. Maybe she didn’t need Lukas’s abstergent after all. She’d starved the Spirit of God to death all on her own.
208-209
I am dying. This is fantastic stuff. Like. Talk about speculative sci-fi! Talk about wild fantasy! I’m pretty sure the way earlier quote about being the man who killed the god your beloved worships could come straight out of like Gideon the Ninth for how weird and Strong it is.
Anyway, I promised the set up would get a bit weirder, so let’s talk about SAP and Fleshcards. FLESH cards, that is. SAP, the anti-god vaccine, is not a vaccine at all. Rather, it’s a temporary blocker of god, filling in your Godzones so he can’t sneak in there. This is already hilarious, but rather than being a simple booster shot you get every few months, SAP drains at different rates per person and per activity. Exposure to people without SAP talking about God can lower your SAP levels as God tries to worm his way in there. The average refill time is every six months, but there is some nearly quantifiable way to track how strong god is by how he drains your SAP. And to keep track of SAP, of course, everyone has a Fleshcard. Fleshcards are just microchips under the skin, but given a way more Cronenburg name that delights me. All of this science to quantify god is incredible, sort of undermining the entire notion of god as a divine, unknowable source. We do know god, he took 2% of my SAP supply last time he visited.
Sap in the system equaled no religious absorption. It wasn’t rocket science- it was medical science. Something his brother knew a thing or two about. So why was it so hard for Caster to understand?
“Gatlin had a flicker.” Caster spoke so quietly, Lukas barely heard him. “A single blink. For a fraction of a second, his Agathi lit. It was discovered during his most recent brain scan. What if during one of those blinks, some of Briar’s biblical debris lodged in his brain? It could fester. I have to get rid of it.”
226
So we’ve invented a blocker for God and we’ve made him illegal. Let’s talk about how that actually went down. The OLG, or Operation Level Ground, was a government program that… okay, a lot of the worldbuilding is vague on how this went down, possibly because the author could tell the notion of the government suddenly banning by popular vote the majority religion felt too ridiculous. The OLG, also called The Commandment, has banned Christianity and heavily monitors everyone via their Fleshcards, collecting free data on location and body functions beyond monitoring mandatory SAP injections. Getting SAP, by the way, is called ‘levelling’, to add even more terms. So getting rid of God is called ‘being level’. And OLG’s first nefarious step to power? You guessed it! The dreaded POST OFFICE.
Operation Level Ground maintained a no-tolerance policy when it came to Christianity, and everyone knew it. The organization had long ago integrated the United States Postal Service, and now they owned cyberspace. OLG surveilled every email, video stream, blog, social media site, text message, phone call, and all other means of electronic communication known to man, to ensure nothing slipped past.
3
Some people are mysteriously immune to SAP though, like our lead Briar. They are put on full house arrest, complete with a clunky ankle monitor, until they turn 18- at which point they are shipped to the ARC, the Alternative Research Center, until they are cured and safe to mingle in society. Alternative Research Center, by the way, is the most suspicious name I’ve ever seen for something that pretends to be a luxury health spa for curing Christians. There are some obvious contractions here, as will be a running theme: SAP does drain when exposed to Christianity, but it also is said to make people ‘forget’ God and become immune to conversion- at least while they have SAP. The notion of house arresting people immune to SAP makes no sense because it presumes God is indeed an infectious disease the immune have no control over spreading. Surely, in a world where Christianity is banned, very few SAP immune people will actually be Christians at risk of that. Even if they were, they would probably know better than to talk about it openly. So why house arrest? Especially as Briar, our lead, is a wanna-be child psychologist who… is allowed to counsel children. She’s 17 and allowed to hang out with troubled kids online in chat rooms. This might be monitored, but everything else is… and in a world that hates Christians so much, isn’t it kinda weird to trust your child to an underage potential Christian on house arrest?
The little boy’s face had crumpled as he’d told her he wanted his dad back. She’d known how to make him feel better but had swallowed the comforting Bible passage on her tongue and put on the silly wig instead. Blue hair was acceptable. Reciting Scripture would get her arrested.
2
I honestly don’t know if the blue hair wig thing was an intentional dig, as this book predates the phrase ‘blue hair and pronouns’, but this book is very keen on the whole ‘this is what the liberals want’. Blue hair is good, god is not. But more on the godless society later, let’s do a quick ‘actual plot’ break.
Plot
Briar is a 17 year old with a serious issue: she’s not immune to God. Her dad invented SAP and effectively killed Christianity, but Briar is one of the few it doesn’t work on. She suspects it’s because of her Christian Grandmother, who died right before she could be given SAP, praying Briar would never forget God either. Briar has grown up in house arrest getting yearly injections and tests to no result, and as she turns 18 in a few weeks, soon that will end. The doctors tell her she will have to go to the ARC for further treatment, a place that has tons of ads showing it as a luxurious day spa for SAP immune people to be rehabbed. You’d think if such rehab worked they’d give it to under 18s, but no one questions this obvious lie- except Briar’s mother. Briar’s mother, as the wife of the SAP inventor, knows the ARC is all a sham, and truthfully a prison for Christians to be experimented on and tortured. She will not tolerate her daughter going there.
To hit the breaks immediately… it does seem odd the most important man in the history of the world, the man who killed God, has a daughter in this situation. You’d think he would be the best equipped to falsify her records or get an exception. We know precious little about Mr. Godkiller, but he commits suicide a few months before the book happened for unknown reasons. It might be assumed that it was regret, that god snuck in very late and got to him, but it is brought up once and abandoned. What we do know is that he surely on some level helped found the ARC, the Christian torture zone, and thought nothing of it. Neither did his wife. In fact, his wife seems to protest the ARC only on the level of her daughter going there.
“My daughter will not go to the ARC. Not as long as I have breath in my lungs. I am aware of what goes on in that place, Doctor,” She said in a determined whisper. “If you go through with this nonsense, everyone else will be aware too. I have documentation, and plenty of it. Restricted reports, videotaped patient and staff interviews, hidden camera footage, audio recordings. And before you get some wild hair about burning down my house to destroy the evidence, I’ll have you know it’s everywhere- cyberspace, bank vaults, locked in the wall safes of friends and relatives. You’re right about my husband being a brilliant man, Doctor. He covered every base to ensure what you are attempting to do would never happen. No daughter of Windsor Lee will ever set foot in the ARC. Or you’ll regret it.”
17
Briar’s mom is not a character in the book, it should be said. She seems to have a fairly poor relationship with her daughter, launches off this speech, and is never mentioned again when Briar leaves. Yet here she sets up an interesting notion: she and her husband have seemingly set up enough evidence to get a torture lab shut down and break the largest scandal of the century but have refused for however long. She has no qualms about torture or suffering or injustice, but the moment Briar is threatened she’ll do it. This moment feels like something we are to be happy with, that Briar’s mom is so defensive and protective, standing up for Briar even though Briar thinks the ARC is a lovely place still. Yet it paints a monstrous image of Briar’s family. Her dad killed god, her mom covers up crimes against humanity.
(THE REST IS FAR TOO LONG FOR GOODREADS, SEE MY BLOG!)
Yes, this is a Christian book about a vaccine that kills god. I don’t have a lot more to say as an introduction than that. A long time ago I saw this book on Netgalley and saved it because the kerning on the cover was funny- and years later I realized it was a crime I hadn’t read the actual book. This is the kind of hidden treasure I’m all about. I love all the classic bad books we all know, sure, but no one has ever talked about The Commandment by Anna Kitrell but me. That’s incredible. I’m so proud to be breaking this story of hot air balloons and Godzones and all the unhinged story beats set in what appears to be a society greatly improved by removing God.
Part of him wished he and Briar could find a place like that. A little corner where they could stay together forever, hidden from view. A secret, safe haven where he wasn’t responsible for killing the God she loved so much.
174
----- You can read my full review here! Which has a link to me covering it on my youtube as well. It's too long for GoodReads!-----
Plo- I mean premise
In 2050, God is dead and we have killed him. Huzzah! The Commandment, it ought to be clear, is a very Christian book from a Christian press, a demographic category I wouldn’t read if not for the weird science aspect this book tries to pull. And pull it it does! About ten years ago, our main character’s dad invented the infamous vaccine against god. In 2025 (so soon), the American government determined there was no need for Christianity and that Christianity was in fact harmful. American society had decided Christians were the biggest threat to peace, what with their hatred of gay people, abortion, trans people, and constant insistence everyone was going to Hell. Thus, the government commissioned a man to invent a way to end Christians via a vaccine called SAP (Serum to Advance Progressivism). And so peace reigned!
Okay, this is only the first hurdle of worldbuilding, but let’s quickly review it. This book was published in 2018 crucially and felt that only seven years after it was published it would be plausible to imagine America persecuting Christianity to the degree that the gov would murder god. America is, of course, a majority Christian country that still has very Christian traditions built into the government on every level. The book reflects a certain persecution fantasy conservative Christians in America do hold, but Christianity is not under any threat. We have to buy this premise to buy the rest of the book, but it’s so weird to read lengthy explanations of how the United States government will soon view Christianity as a religion of terrorists that must be suppressed in the name of ‘Progressivism’… Though, obviously, this is the exact viewpoint many do have right now. As mentioned, one of the few explanations for why the government would turn so drastically against Christianity is simply human rights. It’s never dug into, but vaguely, gay people exist and need equal rights, and that is the reason Christians are oppressed. Hm Hmmm.
Anyway, SAP is the anti-god vaccine, and it’s not… actually a vaccine. There are so many fascinating ideas in this book, both things you could steal to write a baller novel or just bizarre implications and accidental gaps of knowledge laid too bare. Every human has ‘Agathi’ in their brains in this book, small thorn-like clusters of apparently useless tissue. Science has deemed them useless, like wisdom teeth or an appendix, vestigial mysteries that can even actively harm people who have them. Agathi are described as a mystery, but later in the book, we learn they are far from unknowable: they light up on scans when people interact with the Christian god in any way. Though there’s no ‘benefit’, to paint them as useless brain bits is bizarre. They clearly react to stimuli in a very specific, replicable way! We need to study these suckers. No wonder they’re also called ‘Godzones.’ And yes, Agathi means thorn-shapped, and yes, it’s a crown of thorns hehehe get it.
And yes, Christian God is a deliberate term. This book coyly flirts with admitting other religions are real but never does. A few times there’s an odd sentence that says ‘Christian God’, an odd reminder of the fact this is set in our reality. A bible verse is mentioned that has the word ‘Jews’. But the implications of other religions simply are left unsaid. Are we meant to presume Christians are so oppressed only they got banned, and Muslims are still happily practising? The notion Agathi only work to the Christian God is explicit: they don’t light up to religion in general. This is thus proof of god literally in the flesh. But… wait. Christians don’t even agree on what god is like among themselves.
“The job of the hippocampus with help from the frontal cortex, is to analyze sensory input and decide what’s important enough to remember. Information deemed worthy ends up in long term memory, which is stored in different parts of the brain. The exact reason the Agathus stores information exclusive to the Christian religion has yet to be determined. Despite millions of dollars exhausted on countless studies, the cause remains a mystery.”
58
See, here’s the thing about having secret god holes in everyone’s minds that the Christian God likes to hide in: It gives a concrete method of testing what god likes and dislikes. The way it is described the Agathi respond to thinking of god, choral music, that sort of thing, with varying intensity. As much as it might be per person and per mood, it also is only Christian. I think this means we can finally solve The Great Schism! Have someone watch something on saints. See if the Agathi lights up. Let’s see who’s canon and who isn’t. Put a Mormon in a scan and see if you can’t end that whole thing. In trying to write in scientific evidence that Christianity is the only true religion, the author has accidentally created a horrifying game of asking questions until we learn the exact nature of god based on what lights up his favourite brain spot.
Other religions still press a very specific problem, too, because the Christian God is sort of a timeshare situation. With the number of sects and splits Christianity has it can be debated if there really is one unifying idea of a Christian God to begin with, but we also all know, hopefully, that Christianity is an Abrahamic religion, and shares quite a bit of canon with other religions. The old testament, in particular: the mark of Christianity is Jesus Christ of course, but all that before stuff is still very important… and shared in various portions with Judaism and Islam. This raises some really odd questions. If we scanned a Jewish person thinking about God, would it raise the Agathi’s alarm? The book says no. But what about if it was specifically a section of religious text shared by both religions? Do the Agathi know to differentiate between thinking of god in the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ way? If they do, surely this is more proof god is real and that god is Christian- all of humanity being born with a section of the brain that responds purely to Christian things is proof!
It gets more bizarre as an implication though when you consider history. The thesis of this book is that the Christian god made humanity and made the Agathi to store Godliness in. What happened before Jesus, though? Christianity is still Christianity even when studying the old testament, but the biggest definition of Christianity still depends on a belief in Jesus. Was… humanity made with Agathi that did nothing until Jesus was born? Did Jesus have Agathi? Or did the Agathi respond to old testament stuff in a bible that had yet to be written, knowing somehow what would later be Jewish-only beliefs? Did God put the Agathi in humanity only after Jesus died?
See how fascinating this is? I’m totally distracted from explaining the plot. I would never just pick up a Christian book and scoff at it for being Christian because that doesn’t interest me. Christians… you are valid! I know, I’m so brave, speaking up for the most oppressed demographic on Earth like this, but sarcasm aside, I always try to draw a clear line between making fun of a bad book with weird ideas and just the notion of religion and Christianity. There’s nothing actually wrong with any of that or any religion as a base idea. I’m not interested in picking up a book for a demographic I don’t belong to and reading it just to hate on that demographic, and I’m not interested in reading books that would simply offend or annoy me, nothing else. What fascinates me about The Commandment, and why I picked it up, is because of how strange it is. Science and religion can very much go hand in hand, but this book takes such bold steps to clearly define religion through science and then cowers away from confronting that.
Consider, I mean, a God Vaccine: It’s so ludicrously delicious as an idea. A vaccine after all is typically made of dead or alive cells of the thing you are fighting. By calling it (wrongly) a vaccine, the book implies someone found god and stole his cells. That’s amazing. I want to read about that. Someone found God’s corpse and Christianity is able to be fought like a disease. What? As a lot of people point out when I bring up this book, the whole thing is oddly dismissive of god himself. It implies a world where an all-powerful god can be vaccinated against like the flu. The premise, which I’ll get to, even has a lead who is immune to the god-vaccine, positing the idea God is like a sneaky weasel who climbs into your Godzone to hide unless you wall it up with SAP. At one point the lead imagines god as a shriveled-up corpse in her head, dying in her godzones.
Briar squeezed her eyes shut and concentrated on the quickening. It was no use, she couldn’t feel anything. If she really tried, she thought she might sense what used to be the Holy Spirit, dried and shriveled inside her. Maybe she didn’t need Lukas’s abstergent after all. She’d starved the Spirit of God to death all on her own.
208-209
I am dying. This is fantastic stuff. Like. Talk about speculative sci-fi! Talk about wild fantasy! I’m pretty sure the way earlier quote about being the man who killed the god your beloved worships could come straight out of like Gideon the Ninth for how weird and Strong it is.
Anyway, I promised the set up would get a bit weirder, so let’s talk about SAP and Fleshcards. FLESH cards, that is. SAP, the anti-god vaccine, is not a vaccine at all. Rather, it’s a temporary blocker of god, filling in your Godzones so he can’t sneak in there. This is already hilarious, but rather than being a simple booster shot you get every few months, SAP drains at different rates per person and per activity. Exposure to people without SAP talking about God can lower your SAP levels as God tries to worm his way in there. The average refill time is every six months, but there is some nearly quantifiable way to track how strong god is by how he drains your SAP. And to keep track of SAP, of course, everyone has a Fleshcard. Fleshcards are just microchips under the skin, but given a way more Cronenburg name that delights me. All of this science to quantify god is incredible, sort of undermining the entire notion of god as a divine, unknowable source. We do know god, he took 2% of my SAP supply last time he visited.
Sap in the system equaled no religious absorption. It wasn’t rocket science- it was medical science. Something his brother knew a thing or two about. So why was it so hard for Caster to understand?
“Gatlin had a flicker.” Caster spoke so quietly, Lukas barely heard him. “A single blink. For a fraction of a second, his Agathi lit. It was discovered during his most recent brain scan. What if during one of those blinks, some of Briar’s biblical debris lodged in his brain? It could fester. I have to get rid of it.”
226
So we’ve invented a blocker for God and we’ve made him illegal. Let’s talk about how that actually went down. The OLG, or Operation Level Ground, was a government program that… okay, a lot of the worldbuilding is vague on how this went down, possibly because the author could tell the notion of the government suddenly banning by popular vote the majority religion felt too ridiculous. The OLG, also called The Commandment, has banned Christianity and heavily monitors everyone via their Fleshcards, collecting free data on location and body functions beyond monitoring mandatory SAP injections. Getting SAP, by the way, is called ‘levelling’, to add even more terms. So getting rid of God is called ‘being level’. And OLG’s first nefarious step to power? You guessed it! The dreaded POST OFFICE.
Operation Level Ground maintained a no-tolerance policy when it came to Christianity, and everyone knew it. The organization had long ago integrated the United States Postal Service, and now they owned cyberspace. OLG surveilled every email, video stream, blog, social media site, text message, phone call, and all other means of electronic communication known to man, to ensure nothing slipped past.
3
Some people are mysteriously immune to SAP though, like our lead Briar. They are put on full house arrest, complete with a clunky ankle monitor, until they turn 18- at which point they are shipped to the ARC, the Alternative Research Center, until they are cured and safe to mingle in society. Alternative Research Center, by the way, is the most suspicious name I’ve ever seen for something that pretends to be a luxury health spa for curing Christians. There are some obvious contractions here, as will be a running theme: SAP does drain when exposed to Christianity, but it also is said to make people ‘forget’ God and become immune to conversion- at least while they have SAP. The notion of house arresting people immune to SAP makes no sense because it presumes God is indeed an infectious disease the immune have no control over spreading. Surely, in a world where Christianity is banned, very few SAP immune people will actually be Christians at risk of that. Even if they were, they would probably know better than to talk about it openly. So why house arrest? Especially as Briar, our lead, is a wanna-be child psychologist who… is allowed to counsel children. She’s 17 and allowed to hang out with troubled kids online in chat rooms. This might be monitored, but everything else is… and in a world that hates Christians so much, isn’t it kinda weird to trust your child to an underage potential Christian on house arrest?
The little boy’s face had crumpled as he’d told her he wanted his dad back. She’d known how to make him feel better but had swallowed the comforting Bible passage on her tongue and put on the silly wig instead. Blue hair was acceptable. Reciting Scripture would get her arrested.
2
I honestly don’t know if the blue hair wig thing was an intentional dig, as this book predates the phrase ‘blue hair and pronouns’, but this book is very keen on the whole ‘this is what the liberals want’. Blue hair is good, god is not. But more on the godless society later, let’s do a quick ‘actual plot’ break.
Plot
Briar is a 17 year old with a serious issue: she’s not immune to God. Her dad invented SAP and effectively killed Christianity, but Briar is one of the few it doesn’t work on. She suspects it’s because of her Christian Grandmother, who died right before she could be given SAP, praying Briar would never forget God either. Briar has grown up in house arrest getting yearly injections and tests to no result, and as she turns 18 in a few weeks, soon that will end. The doctors tell her she will have to go to the ARC for further treatment, a place that has tons of ads showing it as a luxurious day spa for SAP immune people to be rehabbed. You’d think if such rehab worked they’d give it to under 18s, but no one questions this obvious lie- except Briar’s mother. Briar’s mother, as the wife of the SAP inventor, knows the ARC is all a sham, and truthfully a prison for Christians to be experimented on and tortured. She will not tolerate her daughter going there.
To hit the breaks immediately… it does seem odd the most important man in the history of the world, the man who killed God, has a daughter in this situation. You’d think he would be the best equipped to falsify her records or get an exception. We know precious little about Mr. Godkiller, but he commits suicide a few months before the book happened for unknown reasons. It might be assumed that it was regret, that god snuck in very late and got to him, but it is brought up once and abandoned. What we do know is that he surely on some level helped found the ARC, the Christian torture zone, and thought nothing of it. Neither did his wife. In fact, his wife seems to protest the ARC only on the level of her daughter going there.
“My daughter will not go to the ARC. Not as long as I have breath in my lungs. I am aware of what goes on in that place, Doctor,” She said in a determined whisper. “If you go through with this nonsense, everyone else will be aware too. I have documentation, and plenty of it. Restricted reports, videotaped patient and staff interviews, hidden camera footage, audio recordings. And before you get some wild hair about burning down my house to destroy the evidence, I’ll have you know it’s everywhere- cyberspace, bank vaults, locked in the wall safes of friends and relatives. You’re right about my husband being a brilliant man, Doctor. He covered every base to ensure what you are attempting to do would never happen. No daughter of Windsor Lee will ever set foot in the ARC. Or you’ll regret it.”
17
Briar’s mom is not a character in the book, it should be said. She seems to have a fairly poor relationship with her daughter, launches off this speech, and is never mentioned again when Briar leaves. Yet here she sets up an interesting notion: she and her husband have seemingly set up enough evidence to get a torture lab shut down and break the largest scandal of the century but have refused for however long. She has no qualms about torture or suffering or injustice, but the moment Briar is threatened she’ll do it. This moment feels like something we are to be happy with, that Briar’s mom is so defensive and protective, standing up for Briar even though Briar thinks the ARC is a lovely place still. Yet it paints a monstrous image of Briar’s family. Her dad killed god, her mom covers up crimes against humanity.
(THE REST IS FAR TOO LONG FOR GOODREADS, SEE MY BLOG!)
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February 24, 2019Now available as an audiobook, read by me! Look it up on Audible or Amazon.com.
August 21, 2018
My full review can be found on the Epilie Aspie Chick blog!
Thank you to Pelican Book Group for providing the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
While I enjoyed the execution, I couldn't help but find myself still disappointed here. The world building here is solid and well done, but the issue is that there are questions I had that didn't get answered or even touched. The SAP and experimental treatment abstergent are used to remove the issue of Christianity and the Christian God as a problem from society. There's a solid argument made as to the reason why and the social events that led up the moment that caused this to occur. However, I still have one issue: what about all the other religions? It's never questioned or asked, brought up at all in conversation. Maybe its my questioning nature, but this was the first thing that came to mind. What about other religions? Why is this only Christianity and what happened to the other ones? Do they also no longer exist or were they removed using other methods? Its a major plot point that still bothers me after having finished the books.
That being said, there are still some worthy points here. While Briar herself is exactly what you would expect from a character who believes in God and isn't responding to the anti-God treatment, the other characters who are actively on it certainly create an interesting dynamic. Lukas, the head of the experimental lab and primary contact point for Briar, sympathizes with her and starts to develop feelings even though his disbelief in God continues. It's fun to see how they interact together when put in a room and forced to work in a small space. Take discrimination and allow it openly, freely - that's what happens here.
Thank you to Pelican Book Group for providing the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
While I enjoyed the execution, I couldn't help but find myself still disappointed here. The world building here is solid and well done, but the issue is that there are questions I had that didn't get answered or even touched. The SAP and experimental treatment abstergent are used to remove the issue of Christianity and the Christian God as a problem from society. There's a solid argument made as to the reason why and the social events that led up the moment that caused this to occur. However, I still have one issue: what about all the other religions? It's never questioned or asked, brought up at all in conversation. Maybe its my questioning nature, but this was the first thing that came to mind. What about other religions? Why is this only Christianity and what happened to the other ones? Do they also no longer exist or were they removed using other methods? Its a major plot point that still bothers me after having finished the books.
That being said, there are still some worthy points here. While Briar herself is exactly what you would expect from a character who believes in God and isn't responding to the anti-God treatment, the other characters who are actively on it certainly create an interesting dynamic. Lukas, the head of the experimental lab and primary contact point for Briar, sympathizes with her and starts to develop feelings even though his disbelief in God continues. It's fun to see how they interact together when put in a room and forced to work in a small space. Take discrimination and allow it openly, freely - that's what happens here.
March 5, 2023
The scientist in me screams because this book says they found God, took a piece of him, made a vaccine against God, and yet nobody has ever seen God. This is 2018 literature but it's being done right now. I know people who say the Covid vaccine locks you away from talking to God and gives you "triple helix" DNA - it doesn't. Triple helix DNA would turn us into a completely new being and species.
So. Actual book... Briar is our token immune to the zombie plague- I mean the LGBT comfort and world where people are happier. She's not being converted from her faith even though her father literally killed God. Briar is so immune that much like every story with the token immune, she needs to be sent to a place and used as experimentation to end equal rights and bring back God and beating your wife into submission in the name of the holy lord.
Briar ends up drugged with roofies because this "family fun" book needs to have her drugged on top of talking about all these sexualities and such(and talking about it violently wrong). Why couldn't we just sacrifice Briar like we could have the daughter in Last of Us? Or The Walking Dead? Or anything this is retreading repeatedly.
After the drugging, she chooses to stealth convert someone's child. A child who is trusting and naive. She essentially pressures a child to convert. Cool, what a great character, a religious groomer seeing a child and knowing they're unable to defend themselves from big adult concepts like sin and God. This is a real-life church tactic and people of faith do this, very often to grieving and devastated people -and especially children. Briar does that. Ew.
Also for some reason, Godless people adore hot air balloons. I don't understand this but it's throughout the book. What? I'm not understanding this. I've met a lot of LGBT and gay people, nobody has ever cared about hot air balloons. Is this supposed to be a play on the autistic people who love trains stereotype?
Somehow they're also hyper-advanced hot air balloons... I don't believe that one bit. We had already mastered hot air balloons long ago, they're as advanced as they can be without being made into an entirely different form of transportation.
Gay people are all "against God" in this so even though they have a Christian babysitter, they somehow let that sheep in wolf's clothing walk in. Religion is fiiiine in this book, but it better be the Christian one. Yeah, you read that right, all religion is dead, and nobody is bothered. Except Christianity. Likewise, only Christians are oppressed here, and by the LGBT. Sounds like propaganda? I've no idea what you mean.
It's not like Christian literature is riddled with God over medicine.
Even though God made doctors.
They try to push this equality act of things like "respect pronouns" and "worship how you like" as being an act against them. Even worse, it goes full imagined far left bizarre reality. "Trans people exist" is an actual line. Oh gosh, oh no, people who are now comfortable.
"Dogs are allowed in hospitals" what the fuck. Emotional support animals threaten Christianity since when? Animals are already allowed into hospitals, they have been able to since the the pet program was launched in 2008 with many animals visiting long before that!
This book keeps talking about how much it hates dogs and I don't understand it. Calling them furbags and saying dogs can't have dumb job names -and don't already- and our POV character is attacking these dogs and denouncing them as evil. God made that dog, bitch.
There's another scene where someone is dancing with a dog and they treat it like... I wanna say zoophilia even if they're just dancing. Are they dog-married? Is it saying LGBT equality = pedophilia and zoophilia? I can't tell, but that's a normal Christian mindset.
"Husbands talked about propane tanks" didn't know everyone was Hank Hill. Please tell me there's more to men than propane. Alright.
"Females are female here, and males are... male!" The fact that sex and gender are entirely different things perpetually flies over every Christian author boggles my head. This is a world where people are free to be comfortable and transition, yet there's a rebel faction that forces people to not be comfortable?
Apparently, the anti-God stuff is an acid.
But it also has a cure. Implying it's also poison. Poisons have cures, viruses have vaccines!
If you know even basic science you know why this is even stupider. There's a vaccine for a poison that is also an acid.
Hot air balloon kidnap scene... That feels like a brand-new sentence. There's also very incorrect brain surgery on conscious, unconscious, and semi-conscious people. They also bleach all of their food, which is also not... you can't do that! It's supposed to be something on par with Job but without anything properly lifted from the source material(and Satan already tried that once, why would he try it again?).
I never once mentioned Lucas in this entire review, and that's because, despite the ending bs, Lucas has no use in my eyes to this book besides being a second Briar whenever Briar is out of commission. If Briar is knocked out or restrained, Lucas' personality does a full turn around and he becomes the new Briar. LGBT and equal rights are overthrown in the end, via bs brain surgeries done wrong. So now Briar is free to be dominated by her Christian spouse and submit to him. As says the bible.
1 star, but this is a ride to read. Someone didn't do any research at all, and it shows.
So. Actual book... Briar is our token immune to the zombie plague- I mean the LGBT comfort and world where people are happier. She's not being converted from her faith even though her father literally killed God. Briar is so immune that much like every story with the token immune, she needs to be sent to a place and used as experimentation to end equal rights and bring back God and beating your wife into submission in the name of the holy lord.
Briar ends up drugged with roofies because this "family fun" book needs to have her drugged on top of talking about all these sexualities and such(and talking about it violently wrong). Why couldn't we just sacrifice Briar like we could have the daughter in Last of Us? Or The Walking Dead? Or anything this is retreading repeatedly.
After the drugging, she chooses to stealth convert someone's child. A child who is trusting and naive. She essentially pressures a child to convert. Cool, what a great character, a religious groomer seeing a child and knowing they're unable to defend themselves from big adult concepts like sin and God. This is a real-life church tactic and people of faith do this, very often to grieving and devastated people -and especially children. Briar does that. Ew.
Also for some reason, Godless people adore hot air balloons. I don't understand this but it's throughout the book. What? I'm not understanding this. I've met a lot of LGBT and gay people, nobody has ever cared about hot air balloons. Is this supposed to be a play on the autistic people who love trains stereotype?
Somehow they're also hyper-advanced hot air balloons... I don't believe that one bit. We had already mastered hot air balloons long ago, they're as advanced as they can be without being made into an entirely different form of transportation.
Gay people are all "against God" in this so even though they have a Christian babysitter, they somehow let that sheep in wolf's clothing walk in. Religion is fiiiine in this book, but it better be the Christian one. Yeah, you read that right, all religion is dead, and nobody is bothered. Except Christianity. Likewise, only Christians are oppressed here, and by the LGBT. Sounds like propaganda? I've no idea what you mean.
It's not like Christian literature is riddled with God over medicine.
Even though God made doctors.
They try to push this equality act of things like "respect pronouns" and "worship how you like" as being an act against them. Even worse, it goes full imagined far left bizarre reality. "Trans people exist" is an actual line. Oh gosh, oh no, people who are now comfortable.
"Dogs are allowed in hospitals" what the fuck. Emotional support animals threaten Christianity since when? Animals are already allowed into hospitals, they have been able to since the the pet program was launched in 2008 with many animals visiting long before that!
This book keeps talking about how much it hates dogs and I don't understand it. Calling them furbags and saying dogs can't have dumb job names -and don't already- and our POV character is attacking these dogs and denouncing them as evil. God made that dog, bitch.
There's another scene where someone is dancing with a dog and they treat it like... I wanna say zoophilia even if they're just dancing. Are they dog-married? Is it saying LGBT equality = pedophilia and zoophilia? I can't tell, but that's a normal Christian mindset.
"Husbands talked about propane tanks" didn't know everyone was Hank Hill. Please tell me there's more to men than propane. Alright.
"Females are female here, and males are... male!" The fact that sex and gender are entirely different things perpetually flies over every Christian author boggles my head. This is a world where people are free to be comfortable and transition, yet there's a rebel faction that forces people to not be comfortable?
Apparently, the anti-God stuff is an acid.
But it also has a cure. Implying it's also poison. Poisons have cures, viruses have vaccines!
If you know even basic science you know why this is even stupider. There's a vaccine for a poison that is also an acid.
Hot air balloon kidnap scene... That feels like a brand-new sentence. There's also very incorrect brain surgery on conscious, unconscious, and semi-conscious people. They also bleach all of their food, which is also not... you can't do that! It's supposed to be something on par with Job but without anything properly lifted from the source material(and Satan already tried that once, why would he try it again?).
I never once mentioned Lucas in this entire review, and that's because, despite the ending bs, Lucas has no use in my eyes to this book besides being a second Briar whenever Briar is out of commission. If Briar is knocked out or restrained, Lucas' personality does a full turn around and he becomes the new Briar. LGBT and equal rights are overthrown in the end, via bs brain surgeries done wrong. So now Briar is free to be dominated by her Christian spouse and submit to him. As says the bible.
1 star, but this is a ride to read. Someone didn't do any research at all, and it shows.
June 27, 2019
I love this book.
February 24, 2024
I found this book distasteful. Even with that I reread the beginning to see if I missed the physical description of Briar FMC. Nope. Didn’t miss it. It’s not there. That sets the bar for the book.
The future world this happens in is ridiculous. Meat freezers aren’t around but a pulse-ox meter is a strange new thing. There are also problems with simple things like time and distance. It makes for a very hard book to read.
This book is focused on the God-zone of the brain. Whether that is a vaccine or brain melting acid. Oddly there is zero talk of any god except the Christian God.
Shoe horning in Bible stories or making things sound Bible-esk doesn’t make it religious. I have read the Bible so I understand the references attempted. I am restraining myself on discussing the theology in this book.
The shadow over this whole book was the creepy age gap. She was seventeen most of the book. He was supposedly twenty-four but that’s so unbelievable as to be a throw away number. Then to really set my ick meter off Lucas the MMC has a conversation where Briar FMC’s brain was called virginal.
Congrats you have the dubious honor of being my first 1-star review. I will only give 1 stars when the book is phobic, racist, or some other over the line mentality on top of being a stinker. This was homophobic and transphobic. Do not waste your time.
The future world this happens in is ridiculous. Meat freezers aren’t around but a pulse-ox meter is a strange new thing. There are also problems with simple things like time and distance. It makes for a very hard book to read.
This book is focused on the God-zone of the brain. Whether that is a vaccine or brain melting acid. Oddly there is zero talk of any god except the Christian God.
Shoe horning in Bible stories or making things sound Bible-esk doesn’t make it religious. I have read the Bible so I understand the references attempted. I am restraining myself on discussing the theology in this book.
The shadow over this whole book was the creepy age gap. She was seventeen most of the book. He was supposedly twenty-four but that’s so unbelievable as to be a throw away number. Then to really set my ick meter off Lucas the MMC has a conversation where Briar FMC’s brain was called virginal.
Congrats you have the dubious honor of being my first 1-star review. I will only give 1 stars when the book is phobic, racist, or some other over the line mentality on top of being a stinker. This was homophobic and transphobic. Do not waste your time.
May 15, 2024
Futuristic Christian Scifi
I loved this story. When I picked it up, I could not put it down. The characters jumped off the page and I hated to see it end. My only complaint? It's not a fifteen book series.
I loved this story. When I picked it up, I could not put it down. The characters jumped off the page and I hated to see it end. My only complaint? It's not a fifteen book series.
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