We have two novels to review, but first a question – does the Book of Revelation need an update? Many of us would say no. To literal believers, the closing book of the Christian Bible remains a valid prophecy of how our sinful world will end, making way for a bright new age. Besides, the book is full of vivid symbolic imagery: the Four Horsemen. The Seventh Seal. The Whore of Babylon, the Mark of the Beast. In modern times, Rastafarians have adopted “Babylon” to mean all of corrupt Western culture, and certain opponents of the GOP in the 1980s invoked Revelation with their slogan “Ronald Wilson Reagan: count the letters.”
The trouble with Revelation is that it’s hard to read. The author, John of Patmos — living on a tiny island in the Aegean, where he probably had been banished for his religious activities — wrote the document late in the first century C.E. Christianity was spreading, testing the tolerance of the Roman Empire as well as the ability of new converts to live by the straightedge principles of the faith. John wrote to members of churches he knew, urging them to stay the course. He described a vision he said an angel had given him. It was a vision of brutally hard times ahead, with epic battles between good and evil on both the earthly plane and in the heavens. Those who stayed pure and righteous would come through the carnage, enjoying eternal life in blessed harmony. Those who didn’t would be cast into a lake of fire.
Sounds simple enough. But John got carried away describing the epic battles and everything in between. He conjured up awesome cascades of plagues and torment, piling on layers of arcane allegory and numerology. He “saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.” Incredibly, gullible humans worship this beast — until 144,000 virgin men, “not defiled with women,” enter the scene, stamping out sin in the name of the Lamb of God. Then all seems well until the next round of tribulation, when seven angels “pour out the vials of the wrath of God” in gruesome detail. So it goes, throughout 22 chapters. Which biblical scholars have pored over, unable to reach consensus on what to make of it all.
Yet the book’s core message has resounded up to our present age. Civilization as we’ve known it is not sustainable. It’s too corrupt, too shaky. (“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” — W.B. Yeats, in 1919.) An apocalypse is due. If you thought the last wave of horror was bad, much worse is yet to come. We just need a clearer, more relatable picture of how the ultimate death throes — and a hoped-for rebirth — might really unfold. The yearning for such a picture has produced a multitude of apocalyptic literature, movies, computer games, and so on.
One update that tries to follow the outlines of John’s Revelation is the series of Left Behind novels by evangelist Tim LaHaye and coauthor Jerry B. Jenkins. In their books the Beast from the Sea, the Antichrist who must be defeated, is a Romanian politician who rises to become secretary-general of the United Nations. From that seat of power he does enormous harm until vanquished by legions of true believers, assisted from on high by an avenging God and Jesus.
The Left Behind books, published between 1995 and 2007, still sell vigorously. They’ve been widely read and influential. The trouble is that they speak mainly to a particular swath of readers: those unlikely to trust the UN or similar entities, but likely to be up for spiritual warfare, with a vengeance. Some observers have linked the Left Behind worldview to key beliefs animating the Christian Right core of the MAGA movement.
Citified intellectuals who read the Pittsburgh Review of Books may ask: Is there an Apocalypse for the rest of us? And lo, there is.
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John of Patmos after many years begat Michael of Pittsburgh. Michael Simms is known mostly as a poet, with numerous collections published and prizes won, though recently he has ventured into fiction. His latest project is an extreme makeover of Revelation, and of Christianity generally. He has stripped the edifice to the studs and is refurnishing it in a three-volume fantasy series. The first book, Bicycles of the Gods, dropped in 2022. The second, The Hummingbird War, is newly released. Both are from Madville Publishing, on track to print the third and final volume next year. Now is a good time to see where Simms has taken us thus far.
Babylon? Obsolete. No longer a factor. The new Mother of Harlots, the throbbing heart of society’s darkness, is Los Angeles. So that is where Bicycles of the Gods begins. On a hill overlooking LA, Jesus has come to earth to launch the Apocalypse, and he’s not alone. His partner for the mission is Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds.
Since the launch is a covert op, the deities arrive incarnated as 12-year-old boys on bicycles. (“I wanted a form that was inconspicuous,” Jesus will explain later. “Also, the bicycles that come with the disguise are really cool.”) To fully cloak their identities, the operatives have taken new names. Jesus now calls himself Jesse. Shiva is Xavi, short for Xavier, a popular Spanish name. Their orders from the Boss upstairs are to incinerate LA and its people. Then another city and another, stopping only when humans get the message and repent. If ever.
But right from the get-go, on that LA hilltop, Jesus/Jesse has misgivings. “I don’t want to be a punishing god like my father,” he confesses. “Don’t think of it as punishment,” Shiva/Xavi says, “Think of it as housekeeping. What the world needs is a good cleansing.”
This brief exchange sets the tone for the series. The tension between saving humans and smoking them will continue. Further, it’s clear we will have an ecumenical apocalypse, engaging multiple gods and religions. (Volume two, The Hummingbird War, introduces the Aztec god of the sun and war, Huitzilopochtli. The first part of his name means “hummingbird” in Nahuatl, and in the book by Simms he’s literally a hummingbird, commanding an air force of fierce little fleet-winged peckers who can poke out your eyeballs in a flash.)
The brief Jesse-Xavi exchange is also on solid theological ground, as far as it goes. Jesus aka Jesse indeed comes across in the New Testament as a different-tempered being than the “jealous god” of the Old, more forgiving, open to followers from anywhere. Shiva aka Xavi has a pivotal role in Hindu religions, sweeping away creation at the end of a cosmic cycle so all can be re-created anew.
However, Bicycles and Hummingbird War go well beyond orthodox theologies. The books show the gods themselves behaving largely as we do, sometimes godly, sometimes less so. In Bicycles, Xavi agrees to hold fire while the boys pedal downhill to scout the City of Angels. On an LA streetcorner they meet prostitutes. Xavi enjoys their company, displaying a prodigious capacity for the purpose and pulling endless wads of cash from his magic pocket to pay, whereas Jesse refrains, using his powers of omniscience to identify a prostitute who’ll become a disciple. Then it’s teamwork time. Xavi produces another gob of money to help that same repentant soul get out of the sex trade and start a cabaret theater. The grateful recipient is Patrick aka Trish, a trans woman destined to spread the Gospel via her act as a drag queen.
Is this a woke Apocalypse? You bet. The wokeness thickens when we meet the Sisters of the Piston, nuns on Harleys who will figure prominently in The Hummingbird War. The sisters are led by Maria, aka Mary, mother of Jesse and a deity in her own right, a daughter of Earth Mother Gaia but now living in Mexico with her ever-faithful husband José.
This is moreover a satirical Apocalypse. To feed LA’s homeless and hungry, Jesse dispenses rafts of tuna sandwiches. “Loaves and fishes,” he says. “Sorry, it’s all I know how to make outside a kitchen.” Later, on side trips to Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, we learn that the latter resembles the upper-income suburban city of Plano, Texas. Sometimes the satire is a bit much. But even then, it tends to land like a corny joke that’s funny anyway. And the novels provide more than enough serious stuff to make a reader care about the characters.
Remember, amid the hijinks, doom stalks everyone. People die, including a complex character whom this reader found fascinating; wish I’d seen more of the person. And the ominous themes often parallel those in the Book of Revelation.
One crisis in Revelation occurs when “a woman clothed with the sun” labors to give birth to a manchild who will “rule all nations” benevolently. Hovering over the woman, an evil red dragon threatens to devour the child. The cover of The Hummingbird War reproduces William Blake’s painting of the subject, and the novel tells an equally dire story centered around a pregnant woman among Jesse’s and Maria’s crew.
Also during the second novel, the Apocalypse begins. A passage in Revelation describes the heavenly star Wormwood, which “fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters … and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.” In The Hummingbird War, after a very strange prelude, “Xavi drove … to the Colorado River where he hijacked a truck carrying pesticides and drove it into the river, poisoning the water supply … [In Tucson] he blew up the Salt River water works, forcing people to drink untreated water … Many of them would sicken and die.” The novel ends with the next steps uncertain, presumably to be treated in book three. Ideally we’ll see more of a couple of major deities.
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The Old Man — the big God who needs no name because he’s that big — makes some memorable appearances in Bicycles and Hummingbird. So does his brother Lucifer, aka Luke. In various business meetings, Jesse notices disturbing similarities between his holy Father and his wicked Uncle: “Both wore expensive clothes and well-shined shoes … Both had the easy self-confidence of the rich and powerful, accustomed to hearing constant praise and having every whim catered to …”
Gradually we learn that the Apocalypse is a focus of multi-cornered contention. The Old Man wants humans destroyed for their sins, which include destroying Nature. Luke wants to preserve humans as living lab rats for his abominable experiments. Jesse has hope for the species. Xavi observes his three fellow gods, trying to decide who, if any, he will side with. All the dudes suspect their male-dominated time may be ending and a female-ruled world may arise.
And a meta-moment surfaces when Jesse sits down for a one-on-one with his Father. The Old Man, reminiscing about the patriarch Abraham (also a character in the novels), admits that He “owes a lot” to Abraham: “When we first met, I was just a whirlwind wandering around the desert. Now look at me, Master of the Universe —”
Jesse cuts in: “You are not Master of the Universe, Dad. We both know there’s a Mystery far beyond what we can know, an intelligence that encompasses everything. An author, if you will, who’s imagined us. You and I are just manifestations of humans’ need to tell stories they can understand.”
Then the meta-moment ends and the action resumes. What we really have in these novels is perhaps an agnostic Apocalypse, or a deistic Apocalypse, or a pantheistic Apocalypse. Not sure I understand it, yet. But it’s worth a read.
