What The Hand

By: Todd Stockwell

Black Comedy about the end of the world follows George Somerset, who recounts his troubled life before and during the Tribulation, as he journeys through heaven to find the answers to life's greatest mysteries.

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Book Description

What the Hand is the first and only black comedy based on the Book of Revelation. As the title, pulled from William Blake's brilliant poem, "The Tyger", suggests, the story involves the big questions of religion, just as Blake questions the apparent dichotomy of a creator of both good and evil.

What the Hand follows the narrative of George Somerset, the reluctant Christian, who finds himself in paradise, having qualified for entrance by a "spider hair". The book chronicles his life on the "Old Earth" as well as his experiences in the earthly heaven God has established for a thousand years. The disappearance in mass of believers in the event known to Christians as the Rapture begins George's awakening as he meets up with a group of other "runners" while hiding in a cave from the minions of the Antichrist and the horrors of the Tribulation, a period of devastation predicted in the Bible.

Together they face demons literal and figurative, hunger, thirst, persecution, natural and man-made disasters, and the question of martyrdom, as George comes to terms with his mortality and immortality. But What the Hand is not merely an adventure story or hardly one at all. It is cultural and historical commentary, a satire about the life and thoughts of a failed man, and weird and pressingly current novel unlike anything ever written.

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