Morning Sentinel
Waterville writer finalist for $10,000 fiction award
By Morning Sentinel staff Kennebec Journal & Morning Sentinel 04/06/2008

WATERVILLE -- Even without God, life goes on.

However dark the statement, it's at the heart of Waterville native Ron Currie Jr.'s 2007 novel "God Is Dead."

The book, which has been reviewed in newspapers in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Boston and London, is on the list of five finalists for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award.

The $10,000 Lions purse is given annually to an American writer 35 or younger for either a novel or collection of short stories. The winner will be announced April 28.

"God Is Dead" is both a novel and a collection of five short stories, depending on whom you ask, Currie, 32, said.

The Los Angeles Times called the book "impressive" and "riveting" and USA Today called it "juvenile and offensive."

It's weirdly wonderful and wonderfully weird, but unforgettable, one reviewer said.

The title "God Is Dead" evolved naturally from the subject matter, Currie said.

"It was a no brainer," he said. "The subject of the book -- God -- literally dies. The title seemed obvious to me. It kind of jumps out at you obviously and from a marketing standpoint, you want it to pop. You want to get people's attention and it doesn't get much better than that."

And when God dies, it's everybody's God, he said.

"In the opening story in the book, God comes to earth in the form of a Sudanese woman and is killed by Janjaweed militia, they're government supported militia men," Currie said. "They are terrorizing black farmers in the western part of the country, the Darfur region."

He said in the book, God is not the omnipotent, omniscient deity that most religions worship, he said.

"He's actually a middle-management flunky who works in a celestial bureaucracy where he can't get anything done," according to Currie. "He feels real bad about what's happening and comes to apologize to one boy in particular."

In bizarre, satirical twists, God angers Sudanese government officials, who vow to destroy the refugee camp where the book opens.

"That's how God is killed," he said. "What happens is a pack of African painted dogs eats the corpse and they in turn are instilled with some of God's omniscience -- kind of Adam and the apple -- a kind of the idea of forbidden knowledge and how if affects you when you're not prepared for it."

The word of God's death gets out -- the feral dogs now speak several languages -- and the world descends into a society of group suicides, child worship and wars based on fate and free will between godless armies, in an absurd metaphor between Islam and Christianity, he said.

And it all comes with a measure of dark humor, he said.

"I've been told it's done well," Currie said of book sales. "It hit the (Boston) Globe's best seller list. I'm making my living doing this."

"God Is Dead" has been translated into German, Italian and Bulgarian languages.

Curry said his second book is in the final editing stages and a third one is in the works.

"It all comes from my background in sci-fi and fantasy," he said. "But also aspiring to write something other than genre fiction. It's pure imagination -- that's part of the fun."

A 1993 graduate of Waterville High School, Currie lives on Gold Street, in Waterville's gritty South End, a couple of streets over from where his father grew up.

Ron Currie Sr., a career firefighter and rescue technician with the Waterville Fire Department, died in Dec. 2007 of cancer related to his exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam. He was 57.

Currie said he has been writing since he was a child with an interest in comic books.

"I did a lot of short stories, I tried my hand at comic books, but I couldn't draw worth a (darn)," he said. "I just read a lot, a lot of fantasy, sci-fi.

Among Currie's influences was the late Kurt Vonnegut, he said.

Currie even has a tattoo on the underside of his right forearm, depicting the tombstone of Vonnegut's character Billy Pilgrim from the book "Slaughterhouse Five."

The stone is inscribed: "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt."

Doug Harlow -- 861-9244

dharlow@centralmaine.com

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