Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife

Counterculture figure Farren (The Time of Feasting) offers a daringly outlandish premise in his fanciful novel, trotting out fragments of erudition with an autodidact's glee (a phrase in classical Italian, an explanation of the origin of coffee, snippets of Egyptian mythology) and an all-star cast including Moses, Jesus Christ, Dylan Thomas and Doc Holliday, in addition to protagonists Jim Morrison and evangelist, now sexpot, Aimee Semple McPherson. Spirit Morrison hobnobs with countless dead celebrities in a strange, afterlife limbo. He's looking for eternal peace, but what he finds is an incoherent whirlwind of a love adventure with McPherson, whose soul has been split in two. The characters, varied as they promise to be, seem cut from the same cloth. The high-energy action devolves into a series of orgies and ambitious philosophical discussions encompassing and skewering everything from religious doctrine to human values, cosmic forces to science fiction. McPherson is forced into a tryst with the god-dog Anubis, while Morrison has a m nage trois with two queens of the galaxy, Epiphany and Devora. Throughout, Farren hemorrhages a sort of metaphysics of the afterlife: Necropolis is a dog-eat-dog world--and, though dead, residents may still suffer the worst fate of being thrown onto the ""Great Double Helix"" of karmic rebirth. The afterlife is populated by such unlikely figures as gun-toting cherubs, serial killers and a rum-and-coke-swigging Moses. With impressive patches of vivid invention, Farren does prove himself to be a strikingly confident world-maker, and among the many flat, self-indulgent jokes, there are a few good ones. The River Styx is mined during the Barbiturate Wars, and soul-selling is the foundation of Hell's economy. Rock star, radical '60s editor and wildly diverse fiction writer Farren's 16th novel is as maniacally uneven, jagged and flashy as his fans have come to expect. (Nov.)