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https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B072JZKB4J
In D. B. Borton’s new comic novel
SECOND COMING, Hank Jones isn’t kidnapped by aliens. He goes voluntarily. What
does he have to lose? It’s spring break, 2007. His freshman comp students have
taken their bad grammar and bad attitudes to Florida. His dissertation, a
semiotic study of package labeling in the 40s and 50s, is going nowhere. And
his ex is sleeping with his dissertation director. So when two aliens walk into
a bar in Bloomington, Indiana, looking for directions, he’s their man. Hank
finds himself riding shotgun to Washington and acting as consultant on a
mission to save the Earth from annihilation.
This book is for everyone who has a soft spot in their
heart for those sci-fi flicks from the 50s, and especially if they’ve wondered,
“What if those guys came back?” Just to complicate matters, an equipment
failure has frozen the visitors’ idea of America in the Eisenhower Era—a time
of Studebakers, Ipana toothpaste, and Brylcreem—when the Atomic Age was just
beginning. The android who’s had an Elvis makeover doesn’t even know that his
idol is dead.
With Hank’s guidance, the
visitors learn what’s changed and what hasn’t. On the one hand, the general
paranoia and hostility of the fifties has yielded to an obsession with
celebrity. The spacemen soon acquire a long list of Facebook friends and blog followers, and a hotel suite full of
gifts, from home-baked chocolate chip cookies and promotional tee shirts to Elvis
memorabilia. On the other hand, Americans would still rather hear an off-key
rendition of “Hound Dog” than a message about planetary destruction.
SECOND COMING is not so much
about space aliens but about celebrity in 21st-century America, the
seductiveness of consumer culture, the self-destructiveness of the human race,
and the very human pleasures of friendship, dogs, and rock ‘n roll. “Yes, it’s
a book with extraterrestrials,” Borton says, “but it’s more about us than about
them.”
Borton is the author of the Cat
Caliban and Gilda Liberty mystery series, published by Berkley, Fawcett, and
Hilliard and Harris. Earlier in life, she converted a history of late-night
movie watching into a doctoral minor and a teaching career, much of which has
been devoted to teaching today’s college students that humor wasn’t born
yesterday. SECOND COMING can be read in its entirety on her website, www.dbborton.com.
Contact D. B. Borton, dbborton@earthlink.net,
740-369-2081
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