The Silence in Heaven

Lord-Wolff's debut, an Information Age version of seraphic mutiny against the Almighty, takes a bloodthirsty stab at justifying fallen angels' perverse ways to humanity. Zapped by universe-shaking lightning around 40,000 B.C. for innocently speaking his mind, the mighty Celestial Tashum lands on Stone Age Bermuda, agonizingly separated from heavenly Light, from his fellow rebels and from his beloved brother Paladin. The telepathic Tashum searches fruitlessly for Paladin across continents and centuries, torn between pity and revulsion for the half-bestial, half-angelic humans who somehow had split heaven. In 1509, Tashum rescues two particularly repulsive specimens, Fanny and Dickey, from a shipwreck, but the life-saving ammoniac ichor from Tashum's angelic veins turns them into free-wheeling vampires. Extended into the contemporary world where Tashum enjoys phenomenal wealth through gambling, the bulk of this confusing exercise in implausibility traces his increasingly campy battles with Fanny, Dickey and their nasty cowboy-toy Victor to win control of the ""orbs"" Tashum needs to juggle his way back to Paradise. So poor are these characterizations that, by comparison, Lord-Wolff's two-dimensional spectrum of fallen angels, from the saintly to the unspeakable Mayhem, look almost appealing. Nothing, however, can save this novel--the launch of a projected trilogy--from its miseries: characters vanish, then inexplicably resurface; scenes shift without justification or punctuation; plot lines sprawl into pandemonium. Siphoning off the grandeur of his Miltonic inspiration and transfusing it with foggily redundant obscenities, Lord-Wolff denatures evil into sniggering adolescent angst. (Jan.)