Today, longtime zine publisher Jeff Somers released his latest novel,
The Electric Church, and I was lucky enough to read it before it was published. It's a dystopian sci-fi thriller describing a world where the disparity between rich and poor has grown so wide that it's become all out war between everyone. Somers's antihero, gunner Avery Cates, navigates his way into even more trouble than he's typically used to when he's given a devil's bargain to investigate The Electric Church, a rapidly spreading religion that claims to offer the secret to eternal life. Longtime readers of Somers's zine,
The Inner Swine, will rejoice that all the typical Somers wit still shines through in the action-centered narrative. Apparently a sequel,
The Digital Plague, is already in the works. To sum it up,
The Electric Church is a good novel from a good novelist, and I'm happy to see a longtime zine publisher being given wider distribution by Orbit Books, an imprint of Warner Books I believe.