Word: angels
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Lately we've been fighting off an infestation of angels. Swarms of these winged pests have invaded the movie Legion, the video game Bayonetta and the TV series Supernatural, and now they've turned up in a book called Angelology by Danielle Trussoni. They're like cicadas. And these aren't the good kind of angel either. They're the fallen kind...
Trussoni is a bit of a fallen angel herself. In 2006 her memoir Falling Through the Earth put her in the upper echelons of the literary heavens, but with Angelology she has voluntarily consigned herself to the infernal realm of the commercial thriller. Angelology is based on a literal interpretation of a passage in Genesis that describes angels interbreeding with human women to produce powerful hybrid beings called Nephilim. Trussoni supposes - and why shouldn't she? - that the Nephilim are still among us, a wealthy, evil élite who secretly guide the affairs of men. It's a killer premise...
...other times, Angelology finds an almost hallucinatory power. In a flashback, a 9-year-old Evangeline tails her mysterious father to a darkened warehouse in lower Manhattan. Inside, three cages hang from the ceiling. In each cage is a giant, resplendently winged angel. "One of them appeared to be nearly insane with rage," she recalls. "It clutched the bars and screamed obscenities at its captors standing below. The other two were listless, lying limp and sullen, as if drugged or beaten into submission...
...this is seasoned with raucous gag lines, rafter-raising gospel and R&B songs, an inspirational Christian message (Shirley, on her deathbed and surrounded by the family, sings to her last breath - then reappears as a white-robed angel ascending to Heaven to finish the song) and the alternately jokey and hectoring presence of Madea. She is the irresistible center of gravity, dispensing both specific advice ("You've been tricked!" she tells the guy with the pushy fiancée. "Tricked by drug dealers! Get a job!") and all-purpose bromides ("If you think good things, good things...
...Greek myths: Percy (played by Logan Lerman in the movie) is actually Perseus, a demigod son of Poseidon. He faces down remodeled versions of such perils as Medusa (in New Jersey), the land of the lotus eaters (in Vegas) and Ares, the god of war (a Hell's Angel). Olympus is on top of the Empire State Building. Hades is in Los Angeles...