Heathern

by Jack Womack

Book Overview

Heathern, the sequel to Ambient and Terraplane, has been praised by William Gibson as a savage urban baroque informed by a penetrating humanity ... his best so far Tautly written and appallingly funny, Heathern is a dystopian tale of corporate combat and media warfare in the fading years of our century.
Thatcher Dryden, former drug kingpin and now leader of the megacorporation Dryco, intends to supply a waiting world with the Messiah it so desperately...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802135633
• ISBN13: 9780802135636
• Release Date: April 1998
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

The stuff of millennial nightmares

Womack's "Heathern," another installment in his brutal near-future satire (collectively known as the "Dryco Chronicles"), hinges on concerns expressed in "Elvissey" and "Terraplane" (and, to a lesser extent, his ultraviolent "Ambient"). When a schoolteacher demonstrates the ability to resurrect the dead, marketing kingpin Thatcher Dryden launches a campaign to exploit his potential as a messiah. The world outside Dryden's corporate corridors has fallen into ecological and social catastrophe: a haunting, utterly dehumanized caricature of late 20th century. Womack's narrative skill lies in his ability to make his future, as well as his characters, seem inevitable. This is the stuff of millennial nightmares.

This one's not a "smirker"

If you're looking for a messiah,look no further than the pages of Jack Womack's novel Heathern. This novel tells the story of the marketing of a reluctant messiah and is set in a futuristic New York City that defies the word condemned. If you aren't looking for a Christ child, believe me, baby, the future according to Womack is desperate for deliverance. The reader is thrown headlong into the deceptive and duplicitous dealings of a man named Thatcher Dryden who is rumoured to have gained control of the city, the president, and quite possibly, the world. His discovery of the fact that an unemployed school teacher is working miracles in the gang-infested slums of New York leads him to try to gain control of the one thing that would offer him the key to total population control: redemption. The story travels to the top of the anthill, where the rich and overfed survey their lessers feeding upon themselves like so many rats; to the intestines of the earth, where mutants and other castoffs of humanity fester in abandoned subway terminals; and provides the reader with a compelling, satirical look at the future, its progeny, and the power and commodification of a messiah.

Quite simply, SF for adults

I used to think whimsy was incompatible with a world-toughened, gimlet-eyed take on reality. That's until I started reading Jack Womack. Not *only* does he write works of lucid and humane beauty (which are typically if regrettably marketed as genre SF by the same boneheaded quants who sent PKD to his early grave), but he's the most incisive critic of English-language-as-annihilator-of-meaning since George Orwell. Read *Heathern*. Then go get *Elvissey* and *Random Acts*. For a non-SF, non-Dryco, bitterly funny book, try *Let's Put The Future Behind Us*. The stuff is *that* good. You'll feel a little sadder and a little wiser and somehow more hopeful after having read *Heathern*, and you won't have to have been polluted by "Touched By An Angel." Verily, if the whole human race were on trial for its life, Jack Womack is the kind of writer you'd want to hold up and offer as evidence and argument for redemption.