Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife
Language: English
Pages: 464
ISBN: 0312206542
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Part devil, part angel, the specter of Jim Morrison has haunted America's consciousness since his premature death in 1971. His spirit seemed dark, and the graphic despair of his Lizard King persona reigned supreme in his lifetime, but Jim Morrison died with a smile on his face. Was his journey through the afterlife as tumultuous as his journey through life? This is the question Mick Farren answers in his fascinatingly complex novel based on one of the twentieth century's most enigmatic figures.
Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife picks up the story of Morrison as he hurtles through a purgatory-like afterlife in search of some way to bring his soul to peace. Along the way he finds Doc Holliday--and together they find themselves chasing the restless fire-and-brimstone evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, whose soul has broken after death into two warring halves. McPherson's sexier half becomes the object of Jim's obsession, and as the two struggle to find each other in this disordered land, their wild, careening chase through a dozen dystopiae recalls imagined worlds as diverse as Burgess's A Clockwork Orange or Terry Gilliam's Brazil.
This is a daring, hilarious romp through the landfill of millennial society. Possessed of an imagination that rivals that of any of our edgiest fantasists, steeped in the detritus and ephemera of three decades of pop culture, Mick Farren has crafted in this new novel a bizarre and compelling fantasia.
ever and they, too, seemed completely oblivious to it. Semple was the only one seeing it; and she decided, until she could figure out what was going on, it was best to keep her mouth shut. The next oddity proved to be a drive-in movie theater, long abandoned, slowly ground down by wind and sand. A lopsided marquee showed that its last presentation had been a double feature of Ocean’s Eleven and A Hole in the Head. A large hole had been punched in the center of the otherwise intact screen, as
counting rooms of Kafka’s castle, stood in the teller’s cage of a Victorian banking house, ready to supervise the transaction. He pushed two moist clay tablets, covered in sparrow-scratched cuneiform, in front of the two men. “Make your mark, we’ll bake them later.” Jim look doubtfully at the wet surface of the clay. “Shouldn’t we read these things before we sign them? I’ve signed a lot of dumb contracts in my time and regretted it later.” The clerk sniffed and looked at Jim over his half
were now burned-out, smoke-scarred ruins. The great lawn was plowed up by shell craters, and a World War II vintage Nazi Tiger tank, crudely painted a garish scarlet, stood abandoned on Aimee’s favorite terrace overlooking the lake, where it had apparently been shelling the bejesus out of the Great Cloister with its turret-mounted eighty-eight. Shells and mortars had shattered the trees on the headland where virgins once danced, and reduced the Maxfield Parrish temple to a pile of rubble. Dead
to bring her to this place of degradation and promised pain. Helpless as she was, Semple still flexed her muscles against the restraints and bit down angrily into the hard rubber of the gag, determined that, when the awful moment came, she would give no one the satisfaction of seeing her cower. The awful moment turned out to be a long time coming. Soon even the doctor began to grow impatient. He frowned vexedly at his assistant, who was bent over a wheezing computer that leaked wisps of vapor
show in the eastern sky as Jim moved gratefully up onto dry land. His boots squelched water and more trickled down the inside of his leather jeans. He was soaked to the skin, but since the night was as oppressively warm and humid as Orlando in high summer, it hardly mattered. A clean crisp shirt would have been turned into a damp dishrag in a matter of minutes, even without repeated immersion in the swamp. He was just pleased to be able to walk without having to drag every second step from seven