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ELIJAH
A surrealist novel bearing witness to violence and hypocrisy in the Bible Belt. ELIJAH brilliantly retells the story of the prophet Elijah and the End of Days. Defies the standard "apocalyptic" novel, bringing about catastrophe from the souls of humanity and their misguided piety. Based on the prophet Elijah's biblical journey, this novel reimagines the prophet as a former child evangelist driven to suicide by his gradual fall from grace. Eli guides the living into the nightmarish world of the second coming, where famine and war spread like fire, and only in that fire can humanity be saved.
242 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 13, 2020
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February 1, 2020
I, for one, count myself as a leading expert on the works of Joseph Love, and as the leading expert I have to say Elijah is my favorite piece. You might wonder why have I've spent more than a decade of my life pouring over an obscure author's works. Well, I'm his wife. I'm also other things so sometimes it's hard to sit down after a long day of work and listen to him give me a 30min synopsis of his latest novel. However after years of hearing him drone on about his latest interests, which have bounced from fermentation to Somalia to Abraham Lincoln to so on and so on, I think I've found my favorite thing: The Story of Elijah... from the Bible I guess?!
See, we're a family unit without religion. I don't know much about the Bible. I've still never read the original story of Elijah (even though Joseph provided one of his thrilling synopses). My boss recently mentioned that someone stole a lectern from our conference room, and I thought maybe Joseph had swiped it to upgrade his presentation. Anyway, the story is weird, and Joseph has managed to make it weirder.
In Joseph's story Elijah is a waning child evangelist, paired up with a greasy manager named Holiday. Holiday is what most would consider Elijah's foil. All this stuff happens: death, resurrection, a knock off Tammy Faye Bakker, scavenger birds, so much coffee, flooding, and more death and more death, and a lady God. And in the end, Elijah rides off on a flying fucking Cadillac. Everything smells like gas because Holiday huffs a lot of the stuff.
Elijah, the book not the character but also the character, really drew on my curiosity. I couldn't help but wonder how the book could live up to the first chapter, during which the main character commits suicide and reanimates. But it did. Joseph managed to develop the story to address deeper themes, like the fallacies of the fundamentalist Christian super churches and human trafficking, while painting a beautifully dark and empty landscape. Even the oddities aren't gimmicky.
I loved the book.
See, we're a family unit without religion. I don't know much about the Bible. I've still never read the original story of Elijah (even though Joseph provided one of his thrilling synopses). My boss recently mentioned that someone stole a lectern from our conference room, and I thought maybe Joseph had swiped it to upgrade his presentation. Anyway, the story is weird, and Joseph has managed to make it weirder.
In Joseph's story Elijah is a waning child evangelist, paired up with a greasy manager named Holiday. Holiday is what most would consider Elijah's foil. All this stuff happens: death, resurrection, a knock off Tammy Faye Bakker, scavenger birds, so much coffee, flooding, and more death and more death, and a lady God. And in the end, Elijah rides off on a flying fucking Cadillac. Everything smells like gas because Holiday huffs a lot of the stuff.
Elijah, the book not the character but also the character, really drew on my curiosity. I couldn't help but wonder how the book could live up to the first chapter, during which the main character commits suicide and reanimates. But it did. Joseph managed to develop the story to address deeper themes, like the fallacies of the fundamentalist Christian super churches and human trafficking, while painting a beautifully dark and empty landscape. Even the oddities aren't gimmicky.
I loved the book.
Displaying 1 of 1 review