[Deus Irae] may well be the worst book I have ever read. It struck me as something Tom Wolfe might produce if he were to crossbreed Walter M. Miller's Canticle for Leibowitz with a twisted version of Pilgrim's Progress. Deus Irae centers around a pilgrimage to find God, the God of wrath, and the pilgrim in the book encounters many portents and has many visions as he sticks to the straight and narrow: hence the resemblance to Pilgrim's Progress. Furthermore, the book describes monastic l...

Philip Dick and Roger Zelazny's co-production, Deus Irae, lavishly strews wheezes, rather than ideas. Post-atomic, fragmented, monster-laden world; sardonic religion, the Servants of Wrath, idolizes Carl Lufteuful, the man who pressed the ultimate button; limbless painter sent on pilgrimage on cowpowered cart to find the Holy Face; various encounters with weird philosophical beasts, machines, mutants and metaphysics. Much irony about the relativism of religion and morality, somewhat in the style of J...