Scars on the Face of God: The Devil’s Bible will be available from Drollerie Press in late 2008. Click on the cover to see it full-sized.
The novel was inspired by the Devil’s Bible*, which is central to a legend: Multiple versions of the manuscript, all transcriptions of the Old and New Testaments, were completed in their entirety as penance by 13th century clerics “in one night, with the Devil’s help.” Rediscovered in an orphanage attic, a German version is found to contain writing in Lucifer’s own hand telling of his return to heavenly prominence as the first-born of “two virgins avowed to him (God).”
It’s April 1964 in the weeks preceding Easter. A brick wall unearthed at the excavation site of a new restaurant collapses. Riding a wave of raw sewage that empties into the site are the bones of many human skeletons. Records show a storm sewer behind the wall was backfilled in the 1920s, but the records are wrong. Something is amiss in the small German Catholic town of Three Bridges, PA.
Orphaned at birth and a one-time felon who earned his nickname “from the sound a crowbar makes when it hits a man’s head,” Johannes “Wump” Hozer is the parish’s custodian. Wump is old now, and tired. Childhood memories and strange presentments begin to plague him, one in particular: a drowning infant whose rescue netted him a blanket of bones and an eerie pleading from the newborn “as if it was me who wouldn’t let it go to heaven.”
Where did the bones come from? What could be more horrific than a town’s sewer system filled with human bones? Wump is afraid he’s about to find out.
* The Devil’s Bible, also known as Codex Gigas or “The Giant Book,” contains the Old and New Testaments of the Holy Bible in pre-Vulgate Latin as well as other extensive religious writings of the first and early second millennium. It is currently on display in the Royal Library of Sweden (www.kb.se/hs/eng/djavueng.htm).
