Second Coming (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | D. B. Borton | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

In SECOND COMING, Hank Jones isn’t kidnapped by aliens. He goes voluntarily. What does he have to lose? It’s spring break. His freshman comp students have taken their bad grammar and bad attitudes to Florida. His dissertation, a semiotic study of package labeling in the 40s and 50s, is going nowhere. And his ex is sleeping with his dissertation director. So when two aliens walk into a bar in Bloomington, Indiana, looking for directions, he’s their man.

And they need help, that’s clear. It’s 2007, and they haven’t visited Earth since the 1950s, so their cultural information, like their clothing and their language, is sadly outdated. The android who’s had an Elvis makeover doesn’t even know that his idol is dead.

Hank finds himself riding shotgun to Washington and acting as consultant on a mission to save the Earth from annihilation. Underqualified, he persuades his new friends to hire an entourage of political consultants, security guards, and stylists to help them deliver their warning against nuclear deployment in space. The good news is that the spacemen soon acquire a long list of Facebook friends and blog followers, and a hotel suite full of gifts, from home-baked chocolate chip cookies and promotional tee shirts to Elvis memorabilia. The bad news is that Americans would rather hear an off-key rendition of “Hound Dog” than a message about global destruction.

SECOND COMING is a comic novel not so much about space aliens but about celebrity in 21st-century America, the seductiveness of consumer culture, the self-destructiveness of the human race, and the very human pleasures of friendship, dogs, and rock ‘n roll.