MEMOIR OF A DOOMSDAY PROPHET

In DeVallance’s novel, a young man embarks on a surreal cross-country journey.

Edwin Block, a student at Braithwaite College in bucolic New England, is dejected after receiving yet another failing grade and finding himself on very thin ice with the college authorities. As he sits sadly on campus, he looks idly at a bronze statue of the college’s founder, Thomas Bartholomew Bradford, whose eyes “peered out over the landscape to the woods beyond campus, a permanent scowl etched on his face, as if the works of men and God disappointed him equally.” While he’s contemplating the statue, he meets a mysterious man named Barry “BB” Blankenship, who claims to have a checkered past with Braithwaite. BB also has a plan to take a strange kind of revenge: He and Edwin, he says, should steal the Bradford statue, which BB later thinks will make the perfect talisman for their subsequent journey on the lam after Braithwaite authorities respond to the theft. In the road-trip narrative that results, Edwin has many adventures and encounters a strange religious cult whose sacred tracts oddly attract him. When votaries of the cult show Edwin a vision that involves the statue and the destruction of Manhattan, even hapless Edwin feels he must do something to stop it. DeVallance relates all the events of the story in a zesty style that’s both digressive and omnivorous; it will likely remind many readers of ’70s counterculture-adjacent authors, such as Tom Robbins and Kurt Vonnegut. In this author’s handling, virtually every new detail sparks a long and rambling story, and quite a few of these tales are effectively rendered with a sly sense of humor. Readers who are more interested in the main plot, however, may find that these sidetracks have a tendency to fritter away the narrative’s forward momentum.

An antic, if somewhat talky, picaresque tale of a college dropout and a doomsday cult.