A witty metaphysical satire about what happens when the processes that help souls pass on begin to fail
J
enni Fagan’s satirical fifth novel, The Delusions, opens with an epigraph from the Kurt Vonnegut-inspired science fiction curiosity Venus on the Half-Shell by Philip José Farmer. “The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.” The afterthought leaks back into the original statement, underpinning and undermining everything.
Infinity and eternity are both unavoidably present in The Delusions, which takes place in a vast anteroom to the afterlife, “the largest soul terminus in existence”. It’s the metaphysical equivalent of a big-box store, where they help you sort your false perceptions of yourself from what you actually were, before you’re Processed and sent on to whatever comes next (or, should you fail the Questionnaire, Dissolved on the spot). Though to be honest, no one in Processing is certain what that next thing is.
The queues have always been long, volatile of temper and, like life, full of the angry, the entitled and the afraid. But lately things are getting worse. It’s possible the wider universe has grown sick of the human race, and the Earth is being wound down. In consequence, ribbons of dead people wind across the infinite floor of Processing; unable to cope with the overload, the Leaderboard goes mad and can’t be fixed. Something is happening, up here, down there, and in the broader continuum. The Processing floor is suddenly full of a million cats, and things are increasingly not what they seem.
