In many ways, The Thanatos Syndrome seems like a sequel to Love in the Ruins.

However, it was not planned that way. The main character in Love in the Ruins was quite a radical departure for him. Moved to write such a sweeping work—even if confined narratively to the first four days in July—by America's impending bicentennial, Percy dealt with a subject no less grand than the state of the country: the psychic state of man in the latter days of the second millennium. Given the epic and, at times, mythical scope of his design, it is no wonder that More invents a futuristic contraption called the ontological lapsometer. With this portable device, and with the hilarious—and ruinous—help of the Devil himself (appearing as Art Immelman, a most peculiar foundation bureaucrat), More attempts to diagnose the ills plaguing...