How does Blameless in Abaddon relate to your previous novel, the World Fantasy Award-winning Towing Jehovah?
Both books center around the two-mile-long, dysfunctional–and possibly dead–body of God. So, in one sense, Blameless in Abaddon is a sequel to Towing Jehovah. But it’s also a self-contained story, with a new set of characters. Right now I’m working on the third volume of the Godhead Trilogy, The Eternal Footman, in which the Corpus Dei’s skull goes into orbit like a second moon. Humanity finds this sight so intolerable that a plague of depression descends upon Western civilization. People start seeing–and even conversing with–their own personified deaths. The hero of Blameless in Abaddon, Martin Candle, puts his Creator on trial for crimes against humanity. Are you really that angry at God? Blameless springs directly from my readings in “theodicy,” the justification of God’s ways to humankind. Most such treatises, I feel, suffer from a paradox. In rationalizing evil–the free-will defense, the ontological defense, and so on–the authors end up trivializing it. I’m not angry at God
