"Any book that features a moral battle between a frozen-headed god and a shape-shifting Cheney monster played out on a Hebbian association-deformed surface of a 7-dimensional unit hypersphere is OK by me!" --Hugh Betcham, Betcham Review Services

Say you're the Savior, Fred Christ. Would you want your frozen head to be reaninmated in 1984? The world is going all to hell.

War looms. Earthquakes happen with increasing regularity; weather patterns are awry; birds are in the water, fish in the air. Old ways wither; old languages are lost as the memories of their last surviving speakers disolve like cobwebs. Something rotten this way comes. Governments collapse around the globe, leaving only The Party to rule over all. In a prison cell, a madman spins theories of the mind, conjuring his own freedom.

In cars and bars and shopping malls, proles obediently obey the jaded dictates of Big Brother, Ronald Reagan and Oliver North that emanate from the irony machine they call the telescreen. In a subzero laboratory, a scientist stares at an imprisoned god. And in a lonely bare room in a vast and nearly empty monastery, a young novice studies and prays and contemplates the idea of simple goodness, trying to comprehend chaos. For which his only reward will be the pure torment of The Pains.

In a world that's part Orwell, part Cheney, and part who knows what, a holy man tries to find a way to give meaning to his suffering, and perhaps thereby save us all. With The Pains, John Damien Sundman, an eigenvector of the author of Acts of the Apostles the editor of Cheap Complex Devices, has created his most disturbing, and most hopeful vision yet. Cheeseburger Brown, the creator of Simon of Space brings this universe to life with twelve vivid illustrations.

In a deranged world, what will save us: science or faith? Open your mind, and Fred willing, you will find release from your own pains within these pages.

Read The Pains by John Sundman Online

Paperback: 120 pages
Author: John Damien Sundman
Publisher: Rosalita Associates; 1 edition (November 17, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1929752008
ISBN-13: 978-1929752003

About the Author
John Damien Sundman is an eigenvector of the author of Acts of the Apostles the editor of Cheap Complex Devices.

Acts of the Apostles, the underground cult sensation about nanomachines, neurobiology, Gulf War Syndrome and a Silicon Valley messiah, has been called the ultimate hacker book. Cheap Complex Devices, a report from the Society for Analytical Engines about the inaugural Hofstadter Prize for Machine-written Narrative, is the state of the art in post-human fiction.

Sundman lives in Massachusetts with his longsuffering wife Betty. He really knows absolutely nothing about anything whatsoever. But he's a nice guy and his stories are intriguing and amusing, not to mention well written and reasonably priced!

PRESS RELEASE:
Vineyard Haven Author Pens Third Novel
Dystopian narrative evokes shock and dread of Orwell's classic “1984”

VINEYARD HAVEN — John R. Sundman III, a longtime resident of Martha's Vineyard, has published his third novel. The author is popular among readers of the science fiction genre known as “techno punk,” which grapples with issues such as the role of technology as a destructive force, the devolution of modern civilization, and the threats posed by socio-religious cults in a 21st-century global culture linked by the Internet.

Sundman's new novel, “The Pains,” is a story of faith in a world that appears to be falling apart. It tells the story of Norman Lux, a 24-year-old novitiate in a religious order, who becomes afflicted with something akin to stigmata.

“I wanted to recapture the sense of shock and dread that George Orwell's ‘1984’ inspired when it was published back in the 20th century,” Sundman said. “Orwell’s masterpiece has become so familiar that its basic message no longer shocks and disturbs us. Time and familiarity have diluted its power. I'm hoping that “The Pains” will rekindle some of the visceral excitement that readers experienced when reading ‘1984’ for the first time. That being said, it's not to everybody's taste — some people might find it too shocking or too disturbing.“ ...

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