(1888PressRelease)
October 15, 2007 - Global conflicts; plague, pestilence, and famine; earthquakes and floods; Jerusalem besieged—then, from out of the blue, someone puts a stop to it. The world begins to heal. Death itself may be at an end, fair dealing for all. Hallelujah! There’s just one small problem: the newly crowned King of kings has the wrong name. Worse, he’s loaded with strange and dangerous notions about heaven and hell, about the very essence of conscious existence itself.
That is, in a nutshell, the set up in “The Flesh of Kings,” the debut novel by M. B. Lemanski just published by iUniverse—an edgy, hyper-imaginative, often witty, deeply irreverent look at what’s in store after the long-awaited Battle of Armageddon.
Throughout the yarn, Lemanski, a former science and technology correspondent for Reuters, takes so many swipes at End-Times fundamentalism, at doctrinaire religion in general—some barbed, others more subtle—that you’ll lose count. He builds his truth-is-stranger-than-fiction prognostication on the most permeable foundation of all: human history. Or, as Einstein would say, insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. When it comes to secular dismissals of faith-based prophecy, the author is equally unforgiving. “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.” From start to finish, satire is easily the most potent weapon in Lemanski’s arsenal.
The collapse of the Dome of the Rock on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount in a towering cloud of dust will kick off the Apocalypse, the novel predicts, transforming America into a zero-tolerance, theocratic police state in righteous defence against Muslim reactionaries. WWIII begins almost immediately, complicated by accelerating climate change that produces unprecedented drought and drives horrific mega storms. Plagues of biblical proportion are unleashed—the unforeseen blowback from battlefield germ weapons used to break the stalemate all along the thousand-mile-long front that transects the Holy Land. A third of humanity is erased—everything complying nicely with the Book of Revelation until a wandering preacher with an uncertain background but persuasive charm shows up from out of nowhere and declares, “Enough!” It’s at that point that everything goes off script.
“The Flesh of Kings” is published by iUniverse; ISBN 0-595-43275-1 (trade paperback, $15.95), ISBN 0-595-68213-8 (hard cover, $25.95), and is available from booksellers everywhere. Or, visit www.iUniverse.com; also available at BarnesandNoble.com, Amazon.com, BooksaMillion.com, and other online book outlets worldwide.
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