THE EIGHTH TOWER

Cockeyed farragoes of delusions do seem just right, somehow, for these addlepated times. Keel, a resourceful exemplar (The Mothman Prophecies, p. 100) of what Isaac Asimov once called the CP (crackpot) Factor, wambles through a miasma of UFOs, fireballs, parahumans, strange disappearances, monuments of alien civilizations, programming of humanity by extraterrestrial forces. The thesis, if such it can be called, updates the Martian-conspiracy theory of history, religion, psychology, and even sex. ""As time passed, the real gods disappeared altogether"" to their own nebula, and some of the savvier humans picked up where they'd left off--""mastered the secrets of the superspectrum and even learned to communicate with it"" and founded the ancient forbidden religions. . . . Less a book than a mental marinade.