A war between insects and electricity… Vollmann’s time as a war correspondent during the Soviet-Afghan war (somehow) served as a foundation for his first novel. The conflict is framed within an autobiographical meta narrative in which the author details the history of the bug conflict from his work computer, having remained in the office after hours. Frenetic with schizo-asides and transtemporal detours, You Bright and Risen Angels is the definition of making a long story longer. Nothing is linear. The timeline is completely swallowed up by all of the random addendums and side plots Actually, the denouement of the war occurs in a fictitious second volume, we receive closure through random flash-forward snippets littered all throughout the book.

If you learned anything in that 100-level creative writing course you took to fulfill the last couple credit hours of the humanities requirement for your major, you might remember hearing that you shouldn’t really use coincidence to get your characters out of trouble. Vollmann, however, relies entirely on coincidence in this book. Well, really, he just alters the laws of the universe to fit his story. Like, when you would play superheroes with the neighbor boy and he would fire a fatal laser directly at your chest, but, oh, wait, you had just developed laser immunity, actually, you developed a laser shield that returns the laser directly to sender. The world of You Bright and Risen Angels is melty and gooey, subject to fantastical adjustments at any moment.All I can do is applaud the imagination, writing inane bullshit of this caliber requires generational talent. My write-up might seem negative, but I loved this. There is no doubt in my mind that Vollmann is the greatest living writer.Sidenote: In the unstoppable camera of my mind’s eye, a meeting room full of G-Men in early 1996. After finishing an 18-hour marathon session of popcorn reading You Bright and Risen Angels they all begin cheering and shouting, “we got em!”, because the Author’s Note at the end of the book would convince anybody that Vollmann was, in fact, the unabomber.