Review From Alexiad

JIMMY STU LIVES!
By Kent McDaniel
(Penumbra Publishing; 2011;
ISBN 978-1935563839; $9.99;
Kindle: $2.99)

Reviewed by Tom Feller

In Robert Heinlein’s 1940 novella, “If This Goes On —“, a fundamentalist Christian leader is elected President in 2012 and proceeds to suspend the Constitution and turn the United States into a theocracy. In Kent McDaniel’s novel, future events have not gone that far, but the separation of church and state is no longer observed, and you might say that the United States is a semi-theocracy.

McDaniel’s story begins in the present. The main character is The Reverend James Stuart “Jimmy Stu” Sloan, founder of the mega-church Church of the Living Lord (COTLL), a three thousand person congregation in Nashville, Tennessee. A widower, Jimmy Stu has lost his faith and decides to have his body cryogenically frozen when he dies.

He is revived in 2140, when the world in some ways is…