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Summary: Please read this book!
Review: James Morrow is an extraordinary writer. Who else you've heard of would think of a plague of Nietzche-positive individuals after the death of God? Morrow's fusion of dark humor and philosophy rates him up there with Philip K. Dick and a few others. It's very sad that most people are reading John Grisham or Michael Crichton instead of this master.
Rating: 
Summary: Best of Three!
Review: Of the three novels in Morrow's GodHead Trilogy (Towing Jehovah, Blameless in Abaddon, Eternal Footman), The Eternal Footman was the best. The trilogy has been a fantastic, mind-expanding experience. I am very pleased to see that Morrow made this one to satisfy the desires of loyal readers, yet also constructed something amazing. Thanks
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Summary: Jim Morrow's got it right again...
Review: THE ETERNAL FOOTMAN is possibly Jim Morrow's most scattershot and esoteric novel. Not really happy with only satirizing one topic, Morrow takes on everything from breakfast cereal to art critics in 400 pages, while managing to make some rather interesting observations and arguments about Mankind after religion. This book has recieved some of the most tepid reviews that Morrow has ever gotten (he usually gets enthusiastic praise) but I'll disagree. ALthough it is his least focused novel, it works as a stylistic choice rather than being distracting. At the same time, FOOTMAN is the only novel of Morrow's other than ONLY BEGOTTEN DAUGHTER (which remains his best) that really fuses compelling narrative with compelling philosophy. The other two volumes of his trilogy go too far on other sides. TOWING JEHOVA is too narrative driven, while BLAMELESS IN ABADDON is more stump speach sermon than novel. All of his works are strong satires that anyone could learn from, and THE ETERNAL FOOTMAN is one of his best. If you've never read Jim Morrow before, this is a pretty good introduction to him, although I would say read the other parts of the trilogy first. If you've read the trilogy, don't forget to check out ONLY BEGOTTEN DAUGHTER, probably his best book (and one hell of a wild ride).
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Summary: An Uneasy Mixture of Serious Drama and Ghoulish Comedy
Review: This is the conclusion to what I like to dub Morrow's Unholy Trilogy, which began with the discovery and disposal of God's corpse in Towing Jehovah, and continued with his being put on trial for crimes against humanity in Blameless in Abaddon. The first book was grotesque, fascinating, and funny; the second book was just grotesque and fascinating; and this one, the weakest of the three, is, you guessed it, only grotesque. After God's corpse disintegrated and his skull flew up to become a second moon, a plague of death by doppelgangers, borne through spiritual despair and ennui left by God's absence, spread across the world to shut down modern civilization. A temporary surcease is found through the founding of a paganistic religion which embraces nurture, sex, dance, and laughter, but it is up to a mildly eccentric sculptor and widow to bring forth a sculptor and symbol for new humanistic religion to save civilization. There are many good moments of philosophical examination in the book but just as many moments of gratuitous (and contrived) ghastliness that is very unfunny, e.g., the raiding of a ship carrying cryogenic clients by cannibalistic Texans. It's worth reading if you've already read the previous two books, but first timers, beware.
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Summary: Atheist's Doomsday
Review: This is the final work in Morrow's excellent trilogy on the "death" of God. Unlike the wacky and satirical "Towing Jehovah" and the extremely intellectual "Blameless in Abaddon," this third installment takes on the tones of Stephen King or Dean Koontz in a slightly creepy doomsday scenario. Here God's giant corpse from the previous books finally decomposes, with the skull ascending to the sky and orbiting the Earth, constantly reminding all of humanity that God is really gone. A psychosomatic plague of death wipes out most of the western world before people come to their senses and embrace a new age of rationalism. Once again this is all a vehicle for Morrow's highly structured Atheist theories. He's not an agnostic who believes nothing, but an intellectual who has arrived at Atheism through reason and research. This novel continues to represent Morrow's theology, which is surely thought provoking regardless of your religious persuasion. Unfortunately, this installment is the weakest of the trilogy, with Morrow's post-apocalyptic wasteland showing little imagination or creativity (see King's "The Stand" for a better example), followed by visions of a politically correct future world of enlightenment that are too rosy for belief. Also, the conclusion takes way too long wrapping up too many subplots. But still, Morrow's highly articulate and visionary trilogy will never cease to provide food for thought.
Rating: 
Summary: Ho-Hum
Review: This is the third installment in Morrow's "God-head trilogy." He should have left it at just the first two. While his first two books often pushed his ridiculous atheistic views, at least they were interesting stories. This one is just plain dull. His writing style has become so cumbersome. I can imagine him sitting at his typewriter and consulting a thesaurus with each sentence he writes. It's as though his ego needs to try and prove how intelligent he is to the reader. However, he comes across as bombastic and boring. There were many times that I almost gave up on finishing the novel because it was lulling me to sleep.I won't go into the details of the story since so many other reviews have already done that. However, I will recommend that you pass this book up. At least, check it out from the library and don't waste your money.
Rating:
Summary: Ho-Hum
Review: This is the third installment in Morrow's "God-head trilogy." He should have left it at just the first two. While his first two books often pushed his ridiculous atheistic views, at least they were interesting stories. This one is just plain dull. His writing style has become so cumbersome. I can imagine him sitting at his typewriter and consulting a thesaurus with each sentence he writes. It's as though his ego needs to try and prove how intelligent he is to the reader. However, he comes across as bombastic and boring. There were many times that I almost gave up on finishing the novel because it was lulling me to sleep. I won't go into the details of the story since so many other reviews have already done that. However, I will recommend that you pass this book up. At least, check it out from the library and don't waste your money.
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Summary: Bizarre and Intriguing
Review: This tale is a strange mixture of existential philosophy, apocalyptic fantasy, and a search for meaning after the 'death of God.'
Morrow's previous two books in this trilogy (Towing Jehovah and Blameless in Abaddon) set the stage for the bizarre plot of this concluding novel. But the reader need not have read these prior two books to appreciate the content and plot of The Eternal Footman. Morrow does a nice job of rehashing the necessary details from the earlier stories.
At the center of this book's plot lies the notion of a terrible plague coming to decimate civilization after the dead body of God has been found and publicized. This is a hilarious and ridiculous notion but as metaphor serves as a powerful reminder of our present stage of social and philosophical development.
The literary precursor to The Eternal Footman is Nietzsche's idea of the death of God. Morrow has set it as his aim to expand and explore this philosophic notion. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche wrote: "The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him-you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? ..." Nietzsche was quite concerned that Western culture having come to a place of religious skepticism, now faced a formidable challenge which may well be our doom: the innovation of a new value system without the foundation of God and religious ethics. Nietzsche's arch-nemesis was nihilism. He feared that Western culture would not adapt quickly enough and might fall into a state of pathological nihilism, the inability to form values and hence, the inability to continue a life of suffering without meaning.
Morrow's novel, because it addresses Nietzsche's concerns and provides some pointers towards their solutions, stands out as a profound literary testament in the grand tradition of Dostoyevsky and others. However, his storytelling is at times clumsy and rushed. The uneasy blend he has whipped up, a mixture of fantasy, philosophy, and comedy, requires a 'suspension of disbelief' of, well, disbelief. We must accept, as Morrow's postapocalyptic world has come to accept, that the virtual body of God has fallen into the ocean, has rotten and exploded, and whose skull now hovers in geosynchronous orbit above the Western hemisphere.
Shortly after this skull has come to grace our skies, a terrible plague descends upon humanity and decimates the population. People become 'Nietzsche positive' and begin to have confrontations with their 'fetches.' This is a fascinating idea: Morrow creates these characters called fetches who are the embodiment of a person's awareness of death and a representation of nihilistic pathology. As Morrow writes (in character): "The fetches are coming, millions of us, spawn of the holy skull. Fetches dancing in the Forum, swimming through the Tiber, hiding under your bed. We are the children of Nietzsche and the vectors of nihilism, and as surely as rats carry Pasteurella pestis, we bring a plague of death awareness and a contagion of malignant despair."
The main character of The Eternal Footman is a powerful woman named Nora Burkhart. Her beloved son Kevin has become a victim of the plague and the plot revolves around her attempts to seek a cure for Kevin's terminal sickness. At one point, she converses with her son's fetch (Quincy Azrael) in an attempt to understand what this plague is all about:
"You're planning to kill us all?"
"Death awareness doesn't kill people. Death kills people. Death awareness merely turns them into quivering blobs of ineffectuality. You're a Grecophile. You know about Prometheus. His transgression, you may recall, lay as much in blessing people with death amnesia as in telling them the recipe for combustion."
True enough, she thought. Death amnesia: a fitting term. According to Aeschylus, prior to Prometheus's intervention everyone on Earth knew the exact date and hour of his death, a situation inflicting chronic lethargy on the majority of humankind. When at last unburdened of this awful information, people gradually-inevitably-began acting as if they might live forever. They built cities, pursued sciences, practiced arts, and challenged the gods.
"So even if we weren't carrying a lethal disease in tow," Quincy continued, "the postindustrial world would still be doomed. Don't deny that death denial is central to the human enterprise. Take away the average person's obliviousness to oblivion, and he becomes as torpid as Hamlet on Prozac. Speaking personally, I shall be sorry to see Western civilization disappear. I think it was a hoot, especially the Stanley Cup and stud poker. "
Morrow paints a thought provoking canvas with otherworldly characters, mortal dilemmas, and an occasional bit of wisdom that truly inspires. While some of the story is annoyingly unpolished, much of the language is poetic and captivating.
Rating:
Summary: A challenge to us all
Review: Well, there's so much to say about this book. It isn't simply satire, and those who didn't think it was "funny enough" aren't getting it. This book is a *challenge*. Can we live without the gods? *Dare* we live without gods? Yes. I cannot reccommend this book highly enough. Honestly, I think if everyone read Morrow's trilogy, especially this final book, we wouldn't have to worry about maintaining the wall of seperation between church and state; the wall would crumble from disuse, because there'd be no more church to protect the state from. Maybe I'm taking the book more seriously than even the author intended it, but if so, what the heck. I think this book is a perfect wake-up call to society itself, a "Parable for the Post-Theistic Age" every bit as potent as the ones the plot revolves around.
Rating:
Summary: A challenge to us all
Review: Well, there's so much to say about this book. It isn't simply satire, and those who didn't think it was "funny enough" aren't getting it. This book is a *challenge*. Can we live without the gods? *Dare* we live without gods? Yes. I cannot reccommend this book highly enough. Honestly, I think if everyone read Morrow's trilogy, especially this final book, we wouldn't have to worry about maintaining the wall of seperation between church and state; the wall would crumble from disuse, because there'd be no more church to protect the state from. Maybe I'm taking the book more seriously than even the author intended it, but if so, what the heck. I think this book is a perfect wake-up call to society itself, a "Parable for the Post-Theistic Age" every bit as potent as the ones the plot revolves around.
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