Like Amy Joubert in J R, Elizabeth Booth is an attractive daughter of a wealthy tycoon (the former head of Vorakers Consolidated Reserve [VCR], in southeast Africa). Her husband, Paul Booth, is a fast-talking capitalist who has lost much of Elizabeth's money through bad investments and ill-ad-vised schemes. Now financially strapped, they have moved from New York City to a rented house up the Hudson — a ninety-year-old house in "Carpenter's Gothic" style — where Paul hopes to make it big as a media consultant. One of his clients is Reverend Elton Ude, an evangelical preacher from the rural South who with Paul's help parlays an accidental drowning during a baptism into a providential call for a multimedia crusade against the forces of evil, a.k.a. the powers of darkness: communism, teachers of evolution, the "Jew liberal press," and secular humanists everywhere.

Since he is almost always...