The Savior And The Singing Machine

As he did with Creator and Satan's Psychotherapy and Cure, Jeremy Leven has once again created pure magic with this hilarious, moving, and thought-provoking tale of a man who abandons all to search for Perfect Love. And what could be more perfect to love than the Messiah, who now reappears in the prophesied Second Coming as a knockout young female. Declared to be the God of All Gods, She (her name is, in fact, She) beckons our protagonist, the somewhat bewildered Max Pincus, on a journey which is part Canterbury Tales and part, it becomes increasingly evident, a tongue-in-cheek reworking of the New Testament, from virgin birth to Sermon on the Mount, to… well that would give away what Leven has carefully crafted in this extraordinary tale. Ultimately a love-story, along Pincus's journey to find the new young female Savior, he finds himself attracting a growing cast of self-proclaimed apostles (who, it appears, are neither called nor chosen, but don't especially care), including Rosalie (questionably a – not the – Virgin Mother), Theo Wainwright (an antique dealer who is seeking a satisfactory explanation for the recent passing of his wife of many decades), Sister Gloria Gloria (who keeps the assembly on the most devout spiritual path), Florence (the owner of a New England Bed and breakfast who longs for a life that can be called special), her husband, Sparky (a romantic without the normal bounds one might expect with this designation), his brother, Elliott (along with Sparky, the inventor of the gigantic – and perhaps lethal – Singing Machine, a device with a will of its own and a continually morphing and haunting song which leads all who join Pincus to seek out the new Savior to explain the song's true meaning, dragging the Singing Machine along with them as they…