Cover image for Messiah / Gore Vidal.
Title:
Messiah / Gore Vidal.
ISBN:
9780141180397
0141180390
Publication Info:
New York :
Description:
244 pages ; 20 cm.
Series:
Penguin twentieth-century classics.
Summary:
The story of the creation of a new religion, Cavism, which quickly comes to replace the established but failing Christian religion. When a mortician appears on television to declare that death is infinitely preferable to life, he sparks a religious movement that quickly leaves Christianity and most of Islam in the dust. Gore Vidal's deft and daring blend of satire and prophecy, first published in 1954, eerily anticipates the excesses of Jim Jones, David Koresh, and the Heaven's Gate suicide cult.