“Elvis
Found Working as Ski Instructor in Alps”
“Family Chat with Santa Claus on Holiday in Caribbean” “Killer Ants on
the March from Mexico” and of course: “Astrologists Confirm New Year Alien
Apocalypse” But if they were only
harmless supermarket tabloid headlines intended for comedic effect all could
be forgiven. But the fact people exist
with professed knowledge of such events is where the reality of humanity takes
over. And for as much as the premise of
the Age of Information would seem to dispel such notions, it may only confuse
matters further, particularly in the religious context. Reality so diffuse across available media,
religion in post-modern life has taken on its own tabloid ambiguity.
John
Kessel’s Good News from Outer Space
is a novel existing at the intersection of Christian doctrine, the mysteriously
unexplained, and the technical and social sides of modern life (at least as it
stood in 1989). Bouncing off religious
fervor, alien encounters, psychoses, and the media, the novel is a darkly
humorous snapshot of that quirky, irrational side of humanity that quests for
knowledge about the underlying reality of existence, and in the absence of said
knowledge, can substitute the thing lying closest to hand with complete
conviction. Witty, coy, and sadly
profound, Kessel writes with his finger on the pulse of humanity’s irrational
tendencies, as scary as they sometimes are.
