Making God — Stefan Petrucha

It's the final days of the century, a time traditionally teeming with revolutionaries, mystics and crackpots. Adding fuel to the usual fin de siecle fire is the approaching Millenium, and the epicenter of madness is, inevitably, America. A potent conjunction of genius, schizophrenia and egomania finds its way to the mass culture through a manuscript lost by a brilliant and unlucky recluse, found in the trash by an insane street woman, and marketed by a megalomaniacal Master of the Universe.

Making God, a novel by Stefan Petrucha, internationally-acclaimed author of the graphic version of "The X-Files," is fast, funny and philosophical, a book that locates and dissects the fine loopiness of the late 20th Century with the kind of imagination that often looks frighteningly more like fortune-telling than fiction.

Hapax Trigenomen has written the definitive discourse on Life which he calls "The Great Work," a text whose disturbing power has roused his creepy parents from their customary alcoholic stupor to seize and remove it from their home. It falls into the hands of Calico, a nubile street schizo, whose public readings from the manuscript fascinate business titan Albert Keech. There is clearly some hay to be made from the powerful confluence of Hapax's words and the beautiful Calico's charismatic delivery, and Keech is the man to do so. If it were mere money Keech sought, he would be only an ordinary villain, but Keech is not like other mortals.

What starts as a rich madman's fantasy shortly becomes an engine of destruction. The rapidly snowballing cult of Calico soon attracts the authorities in the form of a female FBI agent in what turns out to be a very personal battle for reason in an hysterical climate of millenium fever that threatens to move the Moon from its perch.

Making God is a novel that defies genre, resonating with the ideas that fire science fiction, fantasy and action novels, but which also intrigues us with the deeper questions of creativity, spirituality and humanity. But mostly it is a ripping good yarn.