Biblical by Christopher Galt

BiblicalBiblical by Christopher Galt
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

“I’m an atheist, the way God intended me to be.” That’s the best line in the book. Fans of the TV series Lost will love this book. It’s full of episodes of bizarre, inexplicable, impossible, spooky occurrences, mostly involving temporal inconsistencies. People experience déjà vu, then see hallucinations of times past. Or are they hallucinations? They seem to be real. The visions are sometimes seen only by a single person. Other times, they are experienced by hundreds or even thousands simultaneously. A man burns to death in front of witnesses where there is no fire or smoke, or even unusual heat. There are mass suicides, accompanied by the enigmatic slogan “We are becoming.”

The main character, John Macbeth, is a psychiatrist. He and his medical and scientific cohorts try to explain away these phenomena by citing various clinical syndromes. The author spends about 200 pages more than necessary just to show off his encyclopedic research into mental disorders. Make that 300 pages. The pseudoscientific jargon gets old after a while, like after page 40 or so in this 440 page book. Okay, make that 400 unnecessary pages.

So there’s a character named Macbeth and an FBI agent named Bundy. Cute. The story line makes no sense, but it’s full of action and the author displays a healthy enough knack for dialogue. Goodreads says the author’s name is a pseudonym. I haven’t researched to see who Galt really is, but he seems to be a journeyman at this kind of thing. I picked this up thinking it was a mystery, but it’s really more science fiction bordering on fantasy. I can only give it an “Okay” but you may find it entertaining if you like to be mildly shocked and terrified in a cloud of mysticism.

View all my reviews