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Vice Blog

LONDON - WHY, GOD, WHY?

A perplexing truth about the world of publishing is that it is incredibly small. Like glandular fever amid sixth formers (Altavista Babelfish Yankee translation: mono amid high-school sophomores) a notable piece of press-releasemanship has a tendency to circulate the international publishing community indiscriminately, and is typically ignored or forwarded or deleted.

So it takes something very striking indeed to catch our attention.

"Jimmy Splendor is an Atheist. When he wakes up in Heaven, he doesn't believe he is dead, and he certainly doesn't believe he is in Heaven. Greeted by his real-life father, whom he hated on Earth, Jimmy takes off running for seven years Earth time (only a few minutes in Heaven)."

This release goes on to explain how in Audrey Levy's novel, Noelle's Ark, an angel encourages Jimmy to visit his still-grieving widow to help her come to terms with his passing through the written word (I hope this conversation took less than ten minutes or I'm pretty sure Heaven-time mechanics dictate that Mrs Splendor would be long dead by that point.

Holy shit. It's like someone took the best parts of Electric Dreams and tooled it up for the American Hannah Montana Evangelist generation to jizz themselves over. Actually that could be an exaggeration. Without having read it I can only assume its offensiveness to the secular community (implicit or explicit) doesn't remotely compare to say the Left Behind series. It was the goof factor that threw us, and the fact that in this day and age someone was willing to publish a book which refers to itself as a 'self-help novel' but has the punchy synopsis of a late Gen-Y Reese Witherspoon rom-com. Wait. Oh shit -- THAT'S RIGHT.