America, circa 2100: 53 states, maxed out consumerism and hedonism, and a presidential candidate part Hollywood glamour, part tech wizard who promises to fix all the problems. Allayed against this platform of dystopic-utopianism, if not outright anti-Christ like bread into stones earthly messianism, is the Franklin family, led by patriarch Increase who, in the not too distant past, led a revolt against the government that created the first intra-American nation since the 1860s. This experiment soon failed, passions cooled, the rebels were pardoned, normalcy set in. 
    Thus begins Thermonuclear Mirth: in a recognizable ‘normal America’ with Increase’s son, Ben, the protagonist of the story, setting out to study dog poetry at the absurdist think tank college East Southwestern South Northeastern West North American University of the Arts and Logic (abbrv. ESSNWNAU-AL, pr. ‘Ess-Wall’) founded by Viennese polymath and Great War veteran Karl Schliemann in the 1940s. Located in the far reaches of the New Mexican desert, Schliemann, he already then distressed by the consumerism and hedonism of his time, founded ESSNWNAU-AL as a societal antidote, a school so absurd, with final project-products more so, that maybe only this, the American consumer finally dumbfounded by his insatiable purchasing of items progressively more vapid and useless, could make the scales fall from his eyes, an awakening commence, a Renaissance begin. 
    Ben graduates from ESSNWNAU-AL and sets out on a veritable odyssey of job seeking under the guidance of his atheistic, bombastic, profane and impossibly handsome ‘job coach’ Hans, as they globetrot from New Mexico to Mississippi to Boise to Europe and back. All the while, and purposely put into a parallel narrative in the footnotes, the wannabe president constructs his evil schemes. After nine hundred pages of a journey equal parts theological, philosophical, comedic, tragic, maximal and absurd, disparate roads converge back in New Mexico, back with the Franklin family, back at ESSNWNAU-AL, with the revelation of Schliemann’s actual reason for founding the school, his connection to the Franklins, the threat of an A.I. induced apocalyptic holocaust, and a Catholic prelate, the Archbishop of the Coastal Mountain West, he simultaneously ‘His Serene Nuclear Highness,’ possessing a singular button and a lonely, but perhaps necessary, choice, one, nonetheless, that contains within it the possibility of eliminating all future possibilities.

* * * * * 

The book is at times sincere, at times absurd, at times extremely absurd; it will make you cry, laugh until you cry, inspire you to learn at least one foreign language, and make you feel guilty, and ashamed, if you cannot do ten pull-ups, jump up and touch 9 feet, and run a respectable mile; it is at times profane, vulgar, and base, (+18 readership) but, unlike scores of books for whom those markers are the goal as well, here such things are only present so as to show the horrid reality of sin so as to lead readers to a clearer, and long lasting, appreciation of the narrow path towards the Good, the True, the Beautiful. The “reality of sin;” so too the reality of beer, politics at Thanksgiving dinner, Rottweilers, Lake Zurich, Rhode Island Red Hens, ad infinitum. This because Thermonuclear Mirth is a book about real life; the messiness of it, yes, down to the very bottom of the well; but the hope, rather the surety, of solutions to the messiness and a path to authentic happiness. 

For Readers 18+ (strong language included)