Love in the Time of the Apocalypse

Book excerpt: Though a dystopian novel hovering over the imminent collapse of American civilization at the hands of a techno-authoritarian state, "Love in the Time of the Apocalypse" is also a book about the triumph of love and humor over the fatal gravitas of life and death. It is part future nightmare part whimsical farce of the present. Love in the Time of the Apocalypse is a work of playful conspiritorial pop-delirium and pastiche full of lovable terrorists, state run breeding houses, Amish casinos, vulgar action scenes, the antichrist, tongue and cheek hyper-masculinity ("perhaps sit-ups can save the world") and a bourgeois love story to top it all. Readers who love Science Fiction, Dystopian Literature, and Conspiracy Theory will find this book chock full of fresh and clever fare. The speculative details are much more subtle than works on the post-apocalypse. The reader can feel both drawn into a bit of a future shock while at the same time remain anchored in a familiar, albeit, terrifying present. Blecha has a way of pulling from current trends of government suppression of freedoms and stretching them ever so softly to their possible conclusion. Thus, rather than a world of utter totalitarianism such at Orwell's 1984, we are presented with a more plausible, more friendly fascism that a society founded on consumerism and entertainment might bring about. Without coming across as a writer with an agenda, Gregory Blecha offers a strong but playful critique of State power, the smothering inefficiency and corruption of bureaucracy, and the role of the over-stimulated, under-critical herd of middle class consumers and middle managers of a collapsing North America. Tramps,plague victims, nihilists and nymphomaniacs along with the main character, a WASP drawn into their exciting world, make for the heroes of the story. The villains are the lifeless and systematic processes of the Federal Government, the Department of Health, the Department of Overpopulation, and the technological control systems of modern life, and yet even these are rendered with an air of playfulness that allows the reader to smile as the world comes crumbling down.