SOURCE: A review of Life after God, in Quill and Quire, Vol. 60, No. 2, February, 1994, p. 24.

In the following review, Horton discusses the theme of despair in Coupland's Life after God.

"You are the first generation raised without religion," reads the epigraph that opens "In The Desert," one of the eight short stories collected in Life After God. One part victory cry, one part curse, it's an enigmatic statement that haunts every page of Douglas Coupland's elegiac new work.

Readers who know Generation X and Shampoo Planet will recognize Life After God's character-pool—a collection of bright young twenty- and thirty-somethings plagued equally by terminal sophistication and media-induced info-burnout. What Coupland fans may not expect, however, are the awesome depths of despair his characters plumb this time around.

Coupland starts things off with "Little Creatures," in which a bitter protagonist, newly separated from his wife, finds himself poisoning his...