This book is a long strange trip so please hang on tight while I try to explain it. First and foremost, forget everything your Sunday school teacher told you about heaven. That doesn’t happen. If that is what you want you, like Aimee, will be sorely disappointed. Basically after you die, you go trough the Great Double Helix. Remember that big machine from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, that broke the boy up into a million bagillion different pieces, and then transported him across the room and put him back together? That’s basically the Great Double Helix’s job. After you go trough the great double helix your on a different dimensional plain, where you get psychic powers. Some people like our anti-hero Jim, have very little psychic powers, others have lots and lots and can build their own little places and people. Heaven (Aimee’s version), Necropolis, and the canyon orgy all are examples. Okay now for the story. After Aimee Semple Macpherson overdosed, she went up to heaven. But there wasn’t a prefabricated heaven complete with the lord to praise her for her good work waiting for her. So she got really mad and decided to build her own heaven for all the good little Christians to come home to. But she was bipolar so she broke into two entities, Aimee the good one to build heaven, and Semple became the bad one, and just to piss off her sister she built a hell. So one sunny day in Aimee’s heaven, who’s pissed off because her heaven looks stupid, Jim Morrison comes strolling up the road. Except Jim Morrison has lost his memory in a fight between the Dionysians and the Apollonians. Jim was a Dionysian of course. So Aimee sees Jim coming up the road, and she calls down a big thunder bolt and tries to blast him back to the Great Double Helix. But instead Jim just winds up in a canyon in the middle of a Bacchanalian Orgy. Except Jim’s not really in the mood for an Orgy, and some of the people in it are really creepy. So Jim climbs up a the Canyon wall, and lo and behold who should be sitting on a outcropping but Doc Holliday. Doc is being his usual Doc self, drinking and smoking, and being antisocial. Then Moses shows up to smite the idolaters and fornicators. Since Moses conjured up these people and made them do this in the first place, Jim and Doc don’t think this is right. So Doc pulls out the "Gun that Belonged to Elvis" which is somewhat of a holy relic in the Afterlife, and even tough since he’s already dead it might not kill him one of the golden bullets " will sure fuck him up some." Doc shoots Moses a couple of times, and Moses who actually is the embodiment of some evangelist loses the facade proven by the fact that he says "Fucking-A right were going to make an issue of it," and then throws the ten commandments at Doc and Jim, trying to smite them. Then things get kind of chaotic. Anywho Jim and Doc end up in this little town that Doc created. Jim hangs out, drinking and taking pills, there for a little while with Donna Anna Maria Isabella Conchita Theresa Garcia, Long Time Robert Moore, a rastifarian named Saladeen, and a talking dog who is the embodiment of executed murderer Wayne Stanley Caxton. Then three of the Voodoo mysteres, Danbhalah Le Flambeau, Geude Docteur Piqures aka Dr. Hypodermic, and Baron Tonnerre, show up in town looking for Jim. Jim leaves town with the urging of Doc, and hitches a ride with Long Time Robert Moore, who promptly abandons him, to hang out with some aliens, who Jim decides he wants to meet. At the same time, Simple goes to Necropolis, where she is arrested and sold as a slave to the god-king Anubis. The aliens turn out to be interested in probing Jim, which he doesen’t want, so they use the illusion of two hot space chicks, Epiphany and Devora, who make cameo appearances in More than Mortal. Then there is a bizarre simultaneous sex scene involving Semple, Anubis, Jim, Epiphany and Devora. So then the aliens dump Jim in the middle of a Mesozoic swamp, where he meets "the mammal with no name" who used to be a western murdering desperado. Jim wanders around the swamp and comes upon a mansion where he looks trough the window, and sees Semple carving her initials into the back of an older version of himself. So then Doc shows up and takes Jim down the river, past Isadora Duncan, who apparently spent a week with Doc way back when. Semple, meanwhile gets caught up in a nuclear explosion of Anubis’ and winds up wandering around the desert with our old friend Moses. Jim and Doc go past Gehenna, where Christians with guilty concinces manifest themselves to be tortured. Then they float down the river into hell, which has turned into a netherworld version of Las Vegas. So then in the desert Moses and his tribe get crushed by Godzilla, who then sucks Semple in through his eye into a tumor in his brain, where a goat, who used to be the poet Dylan Thomas, and Jesus Christ hang out and watch Old porn and B movies. So Jim and Doc go to a casino in hell where Sid Vicious, who keeps calling Jim a "fucking hippie" tricks him into going into the possession of Dr. Hypodermic, who proceeds to take him on an odd multidimensional acid trip, that includes, an old school opium den, and a bizarre tunnel where mundane people who lived their lives carefully and goodly, walk towards the light, forever or until they realize that they can change where they are. Jesus controls Godzilla like he was a robot, and commands him to destroy Necropolis, and then transports himself, Semple, and mister Thomas to Aimee’s heaven, where he mutilates and murders several nuns and virgins on the hill. Jim goes to the Island of the Gods where all the members of the Voodoo pantheon are. Aimee blasts Semple, who winds up on the Island of the Gods herself. Then Jim and Semple wake up in a cheap hotel in Hell after almost a week of depravity, where they find out that they have to rescue Doc from a poker game involving Richard Nixon, Kali, some Korean dude, and Satan himself, in his Ike Turner body. Jim does this after threatening Nixon, and the three escape to Aimee’s heaven where all hell has broken loose, no pun intended. Aimee’s nuns have revolted after the serial killer Jesus incident, and have shaved their heads and started crucifying people. Then God shows up. Yes God as in the Bible and the Pope and all that Jazz. Actually according to God he " used to be Allah as well, but we had to subdivide around the twelfth century. The crusades were making us schizophrenic" He speaks like a Shakespearean actor, looks like Christopher Plummer, wears a sharp suit, and has a talking Persian cat who goes completely unexplained. And God is really pissed. I personally LOVE God’s long angry speech so I’m going to include it here in its more or less its entirety. "I’m sorry Aimee, but you have fallen for the same self-delusion as hundreds of thousands before you. You humans constantly operate under the assumption that I, God, give a rat’s ass about the petty comings and goings of a species of big-brained, overdeveloped, and rather violent monkeys. It’s just plain absurd. Some of you start praying to me when you loose your bloody car keys. Okay, a prayer is a prayer, and I don’t mind fending off the odd holocaust or arranging a cancer remission if it’s in a good cause, but car keys? Football games? Lotto? The two-thirty at Aqueduct? Give me a break. It’s nothing more than theological junk mail. All it makes me do is want to put as much distance between myself and humanity as I can. Yes, bad things do happen to good people. And no, Aimee, there is no Santa Claus. It’s a cruel and Random Universe, full of black holes and entropy, where all manner of terrible things happen, deserved or not. And contrary to popular opinion, I didn’t make it, either in a week or two billion years, so you cant blame me when shit comes to pass. Poor little crippled children are a DNA freakout, not a result of any malice on my part. Ebola was a result of you morons cutting down the rain forest, not my divine bloody judgment. I only added a few of the finishing touches- Orchids, woodpeckers, and to my eternal shame, you nasty humans. Believe me as far as the rest goes the math is far too complicated, The universe was originally put together by a consortium of forces that I can only just understand and you couldn’t even begin to take my word for. Have you any idea what the numbers for the Theory of Everything look like? They make quantum mechanics look like two plus two" "But it says in the Bible-" "I’m God, so please don’t quote the Bible to me. That’s another of the great fallacies. I didn’t write that ridiculous book. You think I have nothing better to do with my time than sit around writing inane dietary laws, accounts of primitive battles, and long, boring lists of who begat whom? There’s a Gideon Bible in every hotel room only because MKULTRA put microchips under the gold leaf on the cover. The hippies who used to use the pages to roll joints when they ran out of skins had the right idea. The damned Bible was cobbled together by a bunch of ancient, too-long-in-the-sun psychopaths sitting in caves in the stinking desert, finished up by a conspiracy of patriarchal prehistoric sheep herders who wanted to believe that, somewhere in the sky, there was some Great Shepherd who would take care of them the way they took care of their blasted sheep and goats. And don’t look at me like that, Mr. Thomas. I have nothing against goats; in fact, I number them among my more likable creations. Its the shepherds I have the quarrels with. I mean, they only had to see a bloody bush catch fire and they were off and running. Do you know just how stupid the original Moses was? It took the fool forty years to get across the bloody Sinai. T.E Lawrence did it on a camel in less than a week and he took time off to kill one of his boyfriends on the way by dropping him in quicksand." ............. "Yes, yes, I know all about that. You fancy yourself as Bernadette, the Hammer of God. Well, I’m sorry, lovey, I’m God and I have absolutely no need of a hammer. I have no desire to hammer in either the evening or the morning, and if I did, I’d go to the ironmongers and buy one" "But I-" "Please don’t intterupt" "But I was-" "I said, don’t interrupt. As it is, I’m not particularly pleased wit you, and if you keep interrupting, I may have to do something judgmental. Don’t you think I’ve had to deal with your kind before? It’s really all about sex, isn’t it. Sex and more bloody sex. That’s all you overblown chimps seem to have on your minds. I know what those machine guns and phallic blasted missiles are all about. I’ve seen hundreds like you before, and you never fail to annoy me. I blame it all on that absurd prude Saint Paul. That repressed Syrian tentmaker fouled everything up. The man was completely obsessed with sex. He couldn’t stand the very thought of it. Hated women more than he probably hated himself. Started all those fish-smell jokes. I never encountered such a rancid mind in anyone who managed to get himself canonized. And, believe me, there were some foully rancid saints. And then there were all the bloody Popes that came after him, and those repulsive fools Ferdinand and Isabella, not only putting up the money to find America when it wasn’t lost in the first place, but also forking over the cash for the Inquisition so people could be branded with hot irons and have their eyeballs gouged out and be hanged and buried alive, and all in my name. I’m God, damn it! I absolutely don’t care what people do in the privacy of their bedrooms, or even in the street, for that matter, as long as they don’t annoy the horses. Do you really think that, if I wanted human beings to be celibate, I would have given them genitals and the urge to use them in the first place?"............ "As you’ve all probably gathered by now, I’m not overly enamored of the human race. When the Cro-Magnons started in slaughtering Neanderthals, I pretty much knew that, as a species, you were well off the rails already. I wanted to flood you all out, but I allowed that wretched Noah to talk me into letting him build his ark because he promised to save the giraffes and the rhinoceroses. A little later, I seriously believed that the aliens were going to nuke you all to extinction, but al they did was fry Sodom and Gomorra, which I guess only tends to confirm how wrong I can be when it comes to humanity. I didn’t much like the Roman Empire; the Dark Ages were a mess; I suppose the Renaissance was okay, but then the Industrial Revolution started the whole fossil fuel greenhouse thing going and I knew it would only be a matter of time before you turned it all over to the roaches. What you might call the last straw, the thing that really pissed me off, was that TIME cover story. There it was, white out of black -GOD IS DEAD- in damned great letters, and I decided to give up on the whole pack of you. If you chose to think I was dead, so be it. I was history. You had a gang of oily evangelists to address your need to worship, and I was about to take a cab. In fact, I was very tempted to destroy the whole planet: fire, pestilence, plagues of frogs, every volcano going off at once. The entire apocalyptic works. I was even toying with the idea of making the sun go nova, or at least dropping a large asteroid in the Pacific Ocean. About the only thing that stopped me is that I’m still inordinately fond of giraffes and rhinos - and also cats and whales, harp seals, dolphins, bears, and penguins - so I refrained. Why should they vanish without a trace just because you bipedal bastards are unable to behave yourselves? Oh yes, I know you built some very nice cathedrals, and I really liked Marilyn Monroe and fettuccine alfredo. But they were, in turn canceled out by your concentration camps, Queen for a Day, and man-made neuro toxins. In some respects, I suppose I only have myself to blame. Right back at the beginning, I should have made the entire Earth fireproof. If you’d never discovered fire, your kind would have remained a bunch of monkeys standing up to peer over the tall grass. My only excuse is that I didn’t imagine you would be cunning enough to go from rubbing two sticks together to a thermonuclear weapons capability in little more than the flutter of a cosmic eyelash." Then God basically says that Heaven is becoming too crowded so everyone should stop having babies. This is a wonderful amazing bizarre book, that’s like Dogma to the 20th power combined with one of those weird 60’s SCI FI movies where absolutely nothing makes sense. Its like a wonderful hallucinogenic drug, except without the bad comedown and the prison time. Its fast paced and bizarre, and makes you think about stuff but is fun at the some time. Everyone should read this book.