is a darkly comic coming-of-age story written by the master story teller that author Andrew Dubus III hailed as the funniest American writer since Mark Twain.
The story, set in the 1980s, introduces Billy, a young fundamentalist Christian who feels called to go to Hollywood to make “God’s movie”—a religiously motivated film he believes will further God’s intentions in the world. But everything goes off the rails when he accepts a job to direct a soft-porn slasher/exploitation film in apartheid-era South Africa.
Billy justifies compromises along the way by clinging to the hope his B-movie efforts are being “used by God” and will become a “stepping stone” to his divinely-sanctioned End Times picture. Billy loses his fundamentalist faith, his film career, his family and more but he finds a strange kind of peace in a most unexpected place.
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Read an excerpt here.