Animal God Paranormal, Gay Romance
JMS Books
Jun 15th, 2024
Kindle
197
Amazon
Forever-young Oscar, in a present-day prison cell, tells a story from his early life. As Diver, one of the first Homo sapiens, he’s the sole survivor of our people when our original home, Lake Makgadikgadi, dries up. Searching in vain for others, desperately lonely, he encounters a stranger with burning eyes, whose uncommon beauty calms Diver’s fears.
Fiery-eyed Geb is a godlike being allied with animals. At first, he’s charged with orchestrating Diver’s death. Nothing personal, he likes Diver, but duty comes first. For the moment, Diver is the last of our kind, and Geb is tasked with keeping it that way.
Before Diver outwits the prehistoric animals sent to kill him, Geb shows him their lives through the animals’ own eyes. When he defeats the animals, Diver regrets their loss. This opens Geb’s heart. He works to earn Diver’s trust, a difficult task considering their history and Geb’s spiritual constraints.
Courting Diver, Geb forsakes his duty and makes a big sacrifice to prove his love. Diver learns the secret of how our people might resurface, and Geb promises to always be with him.
In his cell, Oscar suffers a flawed romance, gives his blood for experiments, and meets a strange computer program, John Doe, struggling with amnesia. This AI being loves Oscar’s story of two ancient enemies becoming lovers and saving humanity. When John remembers his lost identity, he helps Oscar escape.
Review By Ulysses Dietz
Member of the Paranormal Romance Guild Review Team
Although R.G. Hendrickson’s book, Animal God, is technically a romance and also technically m/m, it is really rather different from either of those genres. It is a deeply spiritual book that, intentionally or not, taps into the very roots of religious belief, not to mention my personal lifelong struggle to embrace both science and faith. I’d also say you can find a good bit of science fiction stirred into the relatively linear narrative. Being of a certain age, I can also see something of The Twilight Zone here.
We start on a savanna in Stone-Age Africa, where a young man named Diver is desperately trying to find any trace of his people. He is confronted by another man—a man who must be a god—named Geb. Geb is accompanied by three huge, vicious Stone-Age mammals, who he allows to hunt Diver.
Then the scene changes abruptly, and we are with Oscar, a young man in a federal detention center with his boyfriend. They are in separate cells, which are comfortable, but still definitely prison-like. Oscar is allowed to communicate with his boyfriend, but only through a narrow metal opening in their common wall.
We learn a little about how these two young men came to be imprisoned, and we also learn that Oscar suffers from hypergraphia—the compulsion to write—due to the car accident that landed them in prison. The stories that Oscar writes reveal that he is in fact Diver, and that he is the living link to prehistoric humankind. His blood has kept him alive for tens of thousands of years, and the government is trying to figure out how.
This is a nicely written, low-key story—surprisingly low-key given the life-and-death adventures that take place on the pages that Oscar writes in his cell. It is a story that covers thousands of years, one central focus of which is the dilemma of being immortal without any special powers other than longevity. Diver’s immortality is a curse, not a blessing.
It is also the love story between Diver and Geb. Geb is the animal god we meet in the first chapter, but not God, not a supreme being. Geb claims to love Diver, but cannot assist him on his quest in any way, lest he lose his own immortality. Geb cannot interfere with the lives of animals (including humans) on earth. He loves them helplessly, and watches natural history run its often violent, bloody course.
It is an odd book, for sure, but I was compelled by Oscar’s story, and by the metaphysical churnings of this mismatched love story between a human-like god and his resourceful caveman. Caveman, by the way, is an insult, and learning why was, for me, one of the great little moments in this book filled with such moments.