A Pagan's Nightmare

August 7, 2006
After penning several humorous novels about Christian singles (Flabbergasted
), Blackston swaps publishers from Revell to Warner Faith and tries his hand at a dual–story line comic allegory with mixed results. Larry Hutch is a novelist who has a fashionable manuscript about an apparent "reverse rapture": the Christians are left behind, along with a few random pagans. Larry's protagonist, pagan Lanny Hooch, spends his allotted pages trying to find out what has happened to his girlfriend, Miranda, who has disappeared. As Lanny teams up with a pagan disc jockey, they attempt to avoid Christian zealots who are hot on their trail to capture and convert them. There are some attempted humorous looks at what the world might be like as an intentionally over-the-top, all-Christian society: Devil's Food Cake becomes David's Food Cake; the Beatles sing "I Wanna Hold Your Tithe"; and McDonald's staff all wear gold crosses on their sleeves instead of golden arches and serve fries called "McScriptures." But the humor falls flat, and the alternating chapters between the novel's plot and Larry's discussions with various people who are all eager to read his work in progress (and can't put it down once they do) feel like an attempt to persuade the reader that this is good stuff. Even Blackston's fans will be hard-pressed to find the humor here.

Starred review from January 1, 2007
Lanny Hooch, a construction worker, and Ned Neutral, a DJ on "Fence-Straddler AM" in Orlando, find themselves thrown together in a comic apocalypse, or "reverse Rapture," in which they are the only unbelievers left on Earth. The clueless pair flee evangelical bounty hunters from Georgia to Florida to the Bahamas, hoping to find Lanny's girlfriend--whom believers have kidnapped. This episodic tale is actually a screenplay, introduced to the reader by a narrator who is a Baptist literary agent with a chronic need for a sale and a tirelessly moralistic wife who objects to Lanny and Ned's irreverent story. If this sounds confusing, so is G. K. Chesterton's " The Man Who Was Thursday," which Blackston's frantic tale rather resembles. In any case, the wide-ranging satire is a breath of fresh air, poking fun at smug evangelicals as well as the bizarre ideas "unbelievers" entertain about them. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)