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MichaelBy Henry Flesh (with illustrations by John H. Greer)
Fiction | Trade paperback What if, on a blisteringly hot Sunday morning in a Lower East Side tenement building, as sirens scream outside and whirring helicopters dot the sky, the End Time begins? In Henry Flesh's bold, startling new novel, Stephen is an ill and unemployed proofreader with a persistent sensation of being "trapped in his body...absolutely alone." Approaching fifty, he has lost to AIDS almost everyone who mattered to himÑÑincluding his lover, Robert, dead now for three years. On that Sunday morning, as Stephen's television broadcasts frightening news of a potentially perilous crisis in Russia, he is visited by three initiates of a strange and recently omnipresent religious cult, the Children of Michael. "Good news, brother," says a beautiful, seductive young man named Timothy. "The archangel Michael is coming. The end is near." Those who have read Flesh's Lambda Literary Award winning Massage will know that its author likes to walk the line where (as one reviewer wrote) "danger converges with excitement." In Michael, the visit of Timothy and the other cult members drives a frantic Stephen from his apartment in search of an elusive past, out onto the streets of a New York City that is familiar yet completely out of kilter. As he makes his way through throngs of stoned and oblivious East Villagers, portentous signs are everywhere: Thousands of stars shoot across an eerie, orangish firmament; planes explode in the sky. Then, while Stephen has a disturbing sexual encounter at a nearly deserted night club, nuclear war breaks out between Russia and Chechnya. Is this the end of the world, as Timothy had prophesied? Will Michael return? Or is it the fever dream of a man terrified at the prospect of being middle-aged and alone? With thirty-one haunting illustrations by John H. Greer, Michael is a book that is bound to be controversial, combining as it does fundamentalist Christian theology with a highly sensuous homoeroticism. More than anything, though, despite any potential controversy, it is a work of a powerful and otherworldly beauty. *** Henry Flesh dropped out of Yale in the sixties and spent many of the ensuing years abroad, in London, Crete, and Morocco. His first novel, Massage, was the 1999 Lambda Literary Award winner for best title from a Small Press. He currently lives in New York City, and works as an editor at People magazine. Illustrator John Greer grew up in southern Virginia, and studied art at Virgina Commonwealth University and Hunter College. He belonged to a right-wing Christian cult for five years, but has since become enlightened and is now an artist living in Manhattan's Lower East Side. Henry Flesh reads on MP3 |
