Garry Degrood

God, the Devil, and the Great Poultice Garry Degrood

God, the devil, and the Great Poultice is a novel reminiscent of Dante's Inferno or Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita with elements of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment and Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls. It is a tale of life and death, good versus evil, crime and punishment, salvation and damnation. God and the Devil begin the final battle leading up to Armageddon. God appoints a dead soul as the Great Poultice, an imperfect sinner who narrowly escapes an eternity in hell. The Great Poultice is tasked with deciding the fate of other dead souls while God is busy battling the Devil. There are graphic descriptions of evil perpetrated by some of the souls who appear before him. The Great Poultice has the ability to review the entire mortal life of the soul who appears in his chamber, from birth until death via an interactive, hyperlinked panorama. He is motivated by a strong desire for justice and believes in judging others by the causality of their crimes and sins. The Great Poultice falls victim to Lord Acton's aphorism "power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." The epiphany which follows is meant to convey a sense of hope for humanity.