Love in the Time of the Apocalypse (2005) (edit title/settings)

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Liked It Rated 5 stars “Though a dystopian novel hovering over the imminent collapse of American civilization at the hands of a techno-authoritarian state, Love in the Time of the Apocalypse is also a book about the triumph of love and humor over the middle managers of life and death. It is part future nightmare part...” see full review » see other reviews »

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  “My dad wrote this book.”

  Brandon B wrote this review Thursday, December 23, 2010. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No

  
  
  • Rated 5 stars

  “Though a dystopian novel hovering over the imminent collapse of American civilization at the hands of a techno-authoritarian state, Love in the Time of the Apocalypse is also a book about the triumph of love and humor over the middle managers of life and death. It is part future nightmare part whimsical farce of the present. I've read it three times now and am amazed when I meet people who love such works as A Brave New World, 1984, or the works of Philip K. Dick, but haven't read this one.
  
  Author Greg Blecha writes in a style, humorous and sensual, that draws the reader into a world just beyond our own. The Aryan Nation has congealed into a proto-state along the border of the collapsing U.S. Eco-anarchists, nihilists, the Mormon underground, and opium cartels defended by armies of children, circumambulate the dissolving centers of bourgeois frivolity where, despite plague, war, economic collapse, and the excesses of a police state, some are still able to ignore the coming catastrophe, throwing there money away at casinos and other luxuries.
  
  Love in the Time of the Apocalypse is a work of playful conspiritorial pop-delirium and pastiche full of lovable terrorists, state run breeding houses, Amish casinos, vulgar action scenes, the antichrist, the rebirth of the Spanish inquisition, tongue and cheek hyper-masculinity ("perhaps sit-ups can save the world") and a bourgeois love story to top it all.
  
  Readers who love Science Fiction, Dystopian Literature, and Conspiracy Theory will find this book chocked full of fresh and clever fare. One aspect of the text that drew me in is the way Blecha has woven together the world of the near-apocalypse. The speculative details are much more subtle than works on the post-apocalypse. The reader can feel both drawn into a bit of a “future shock” while at the same time remain anchored in a familiar, albeit, terrifying present. Blecha has a way of pulling from current trends of government suppression of freedoms and stretching them ever so softly to their possible conclusion. Thus, rather than a world of utter totalitarianism such at Orwell’s 1984, I found a more plausible, more “friendly” fascism that a society founded on consumerism and entertainment might bring about.
  
  Without coming across as a writer with an agenda, Gregory Blecha offers a strong but playful critique of State power, the inefficiency and corruption of bureaucracy, and the role of the over-stimulated, under-critical herd of middle class consumers and middle managers of a collapsing North America. Tramps,plague victims, nihilists and nymphomaniacs along with the main character, a WASP drawn into their exciting world, make for the heroes of the story. The villains are the lifeless and systematic processes of the Federal Government, the Department of Health, the Department of Overpopulation, and the technological control systems of modern life, and yet even these are rendered with an air of playfulness that allows the reader to smile as the world comes crumbling down.
  
  This is a book that needs to be read!
  
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  R N wrote this review Sunday, March 15, 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No