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Imagine a humorous novel about a suicide who enters heaven and finds it not cosseting but a purgatory where life’s distractions (food, booze, sex, Internet) are removed and the hardest question looms: Why did he kill himself? Welcome to the journey of Steven, an unintentionally funny male whiner, panicker, quitter, porn addict, and general screwup, as he struggles with God, Jesus, and self to escape Heaven’s Suicide Ward and yet not return to the hell of earth. Reminiscent of Douglas Adams’ delightful Hitchhiker series, Stevenson and Azad play this dilemma for all it’s worth, creating ludicrous conversations that leave both Jesus and God mystified.
Steven blames the world for his troubles, trying even the patience of Jesus: “You just sat there like a pussy.…\ the soul that does not find out what it can do in a lifetime is a fucking garden slug!” (Yes, Jesus has issues.) Not allowed to mingle with normal souls, Steven sits in suicide seclusion, punctuated by droll visits with God and disquieting pop-ins by Jesus, to ponder why he shot his face off. God hints, “…it’s obvious you missed something huge in your last life.”
The writing is imaginative and funny: Jesus was the result of God’s affair with a supernova; We were born cannibals (what else was there to eat in the primordial soup?); Mass murderers are reincarnated as plankton; and Earth was an experiment. Steven’s frustrating cluelessness but direct dialog render the deep messages on karma, reincarnation, cosmic energy, and the meaning of life easy to absorb. Does Steven escape Heaven? It’s worth reading this profound yet funny journey to self through the Suicide Wards of Heaven to find out. After all, any author who weaves comedy from suicide and the search for meaning, as Stevenson and Azad do, is a genius.
RECOMMENDED by the US Review