The Eternal Footman

ABOUT THIS BOOK:

The Eternal Footman completes Morrow's darkly comic trilogy about God's untimely demise. The first volume, Towing Jehovah, in which a supertanker crew is commissioned to haul God's giant body to its tomb in the Arctic, won the World Fantasy Award for best novel; the second, Blameless in Abaddon, in which God's surviving neurons are tried before the World Court for crimes against the human race, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

The title comes from T. S. Eliot's “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: the eternal Footman is human mortality. After God’s grinning skull—all that remains of the Corpus Dei—goes into geosynchronous orbit directly above Times Square, a plague “of death awareness” spreads across the Western hemisphere. The first symptom is the appearance of the victim's fetch, a satanic double bent on dragging him to his grave.

As the United States sinks into a world resembling fourteenth-century Europe during the Black Death, two people fight to preserve life and sanity. One is Nora Burkhart, a schoolteacher who will stop at nothing to rescue her only son, Kevin, from his fetch. The other is the renowned sculptor Gerard Korty, who struggles to create a masterwork, carved from a mysterious asteroid, that will heal the metaphysical wounds caused by God’s abdication.

In The Eternal Footman, Morrow combines apocalypse with poetry, wicked humor with humanity. Some highlights: a bloody battle on a New Jersey golf course between Jews and anti-Semites, a theater troupe's stirring dramatization of the Gilgamesh epic, and a never-before-published debate between Martin Luther and Erasmus. The novel also offers Morrow's most chilling villain ever: Dr. Adrian Lucido, founder of a new church in Coatzacoalcos and inventor of a cure worse than any disease.
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