Saint John, a bipolar saint with multiple-personality disorder, and his sex-crazed pagan priestess, Helen, have quite a romance going on. Athenodorus, a perennially-single island-resort owner, finds himself hosting Helen and John as their erotic, religious and accidentally-political adventures ensue. The island's doctor, Pantheonus, a physician with a deep interest in psychology, tries to care for and analyze John, the poet, prophet and madman, as his life and fate drags everyone around him into deeper and deeper peril. The book is written in modern-day conversational motif, and, as was briefly a fashion in cinema, is written in a style that pretends not to notice many modern references occurring in a supposedly-ancient setting. Because of the book's heavy use of traumatic matters and dark subjects, it may be difficult for some readers to view the work as the comedy it really is. Further complicating things is the fact that the book is an unabashed effort to get other authors to work on creating a modern-day mythology to replace some of the now more hopelessly-irrelevant mythologies we've been stuck with. The book is written with cinema in mind and moves more like a movie than a novel. The possible dates of the scenes in this story are blurred to include possible comedic-revisionist allusions to such figures as Nero, Caligula, Augustus Caesar and Constantine. I deliberately refrain from saying whether the island where much of the action takes place is in Greece or Rome. (To push the date, time and continuity problems to the limit, I include a character from my other works who time travels between the modern United States and ancient Asia in order to carry on with his history-disrupting adventures.) The student of history and theology will notice my tacky use of precisely twenty-two chapters, the number of chapters in the actual Book of Revelations. In spite of these "lofty" considerations, the book steers clear of anything like goody-good-ism and fights, at every turn, to inject shock-value subjects and hair-raising horror so that the reader is never allowed to sink into any kind of bedtime-story certainty about any proposition, whether historical, philosophical or social. These effects are not so hard to achieve, since I am myself a continual border-crosser, moving myself from profound Agnosticism to credulous believerhood and back again. The work invites the reader to decide everything for themselves and seeks only to offer a wide array of confusing and unresolvable options.
About the Author: The author got his B.A. in Philosophy at Cal State Fullerton in 1982. He was born in Downey, California, in 1959 to a paranoid-schizophrenic mother and a hard-drinking aerospace executive father. At birth he was seen immediately to have many complex birth defects, which, throughout the years became more evident in their scope and severity. The author was a promiscuous deviant in early childhood and grew to be a church and temple hopper, eventually landing a "steady gig as a born-again Christian" in the Calvary Chapel of Costa Mesa mold. He went on to become a paid youth minister at an Evangelical Southern Baptist Church where he wrote Christian folk rock and preached sermons, and, most critically, brought with him many converts and employed his seemingly innate ability to raise money and work every publicity angle. After five years he became a notorious apostate, heretic and blasphemer. To complicate matters, he ended up as a badly-behaved Buddhist given to writing Buddhist hymns and Buddhist comedy. His legal and political antics were the stuff of news stories for many years; and his odd conceptual art even now appears in newspapers and magazines. In addition to running his own small publishing companies, he has managed to get his own work published in magazines and anthologies around the globe. His largest audience ever was at KMEL Radio in San Francisco, where he was paid to air a short segment on every morning show in which he taunted the rap world with parody. In each and every venue he remains a lark, a crank, a prankster a man with his eye on money and skirts. He defies all classification, except psychiatric classifications, several categories into which he fits most snugly. At this writing, he is 54 year old and in rapidly-declining health, wondering if the time remains to even proofread the errors in the text, and further wondering if he should have to simply put the book to print lest his own end-of-the-world should come. Currently, he, predictably, lives alone and has managed to evade institutionalization up to this point, though he is ever aware that the genetic time bombs that appear to be just going off in him, make the continuance of ordinary life and freedom a largely remote possibility. Even so, Revelations II itself was not written in haste, and is the author's only 200-page novel, and the only novel about which he says he fells "truly complete." The only work of his that he feels may surpass this is his koan book called "Nothing Holy."