James Lawson

The Reluctant God James Lawson

"One afternoon in February, Michael Movius, a thirty-six year old neurotic who had suffered a mild nervous breakdown and was recuperating at a small hospital in upstate New York, transported Edward Ortega, an unloved attendant at the hospital, from the physical world to an unused recess of his mind."

Thus begins a strange and unusual book in a genre all its own, the story of an ordinary man who must assume the mantle of a god. To accommodate the people he brings into his mind from the real world, he must create a world within his imagination, make the sun rise and set, make rain nourish the land, create an environment that can feed and house the inhabitants of his mind, even lay down laws of conduct and morality.

But events in the real world constantly impinge on the world within. And the people in Movius' mind, a microcosm of a normal community, influence the world without. Movius switches back and forth between man and god, incompetence and omnipotence, pettiness and profundity.

Despite its epic scope and philosophical underpinnings, exploring the farthest reaches of the imagination, "The Reluctant God" is an entertaining and eminently readable story of real people trying to cope with an unreal world.