The eternal footman

the long version

"Once God's grinning skull - all that remains of our Creator - goes into geosynchronous orbit directly above Times Square, a plague of "death awareness" spreads across the Western world. Tbe first symptom is the appearance of the victim's fetch, a satanic doppelganger bent on dragging him to the grave."--BOOK JACKET. "As the United States begins to resemble fourteenth-century Europe during the Black Death, two people fight to preserve life and sanity. Nora Burkhart is a schoolteacher who will stop at nothing to rescue her only son, Kevin, from his fetch. Gerard Korty is a renowned sculptor who struggles to create a masterwork, carved from a mysterious asteroid, that will heal the metaphysical wounds caused by God's abdication."--BOOK JACKET. "Among other apocalyptic wonders, Morrow depicts a pitched battle between Jews and anti-Semites on a New Jersey golf course, a theater troupe's stirring dramatization of the Gilgamesh epic, an afterlife debate between Martin Luther and Erasmus, and the villainy of Dr. Adrian Lucido, founder of a new church in Coatzacoalcos and inventor of a cure more dreadful than any disease."--BOOK JACKET.