THE DEVIL'S CALLING

An academic and author, celebrated for revealing a scientific cosmology that refutes the Big Bang theory, fears harm will befall his lover as she embarks on a lecture tour.

Heaven (or Buddha or Vishnu) help those attempting to read Kelley’s sequel without first pilgrimaging through his debut New Age/SF thriller, The Lost Theory (2021). The discipleship curve is steep. Romantic literature scholar Sean McQueen published a hit book elucidating the theory of “constant creation”—an alternative cosmology to the Big Bang that has a strong correlation to Eastern mysticism. The result: Materialism-inclined villains invested in the status quo (particularly big tech heads, espionage types, and authoritarians) nearly killed Sean and his soul mate, scientist Emily “M” Edens. Several years later, the lovers run a female-oriented yogic college, Deeksha West, in coastal Oregon. M enjoys rock-star status as she starts a European lecture tour that challenges an upcoming human-machine digital interface. Meanwhile, Sean prepares a sequel to his bestseller, The Lost Theory (of course entitled The Devil’s Calling). But cherished mentor Juno gives Sean a troubling prediction that M will soon be “lost.” Potential threats include an old CIA enemy; Petrovsky, the post–Vladimir Putin Russian dictator; and those behind the trendy push to mass-link human brains everywhere in cyberspace (promising a utopia but setting the stage for a zombie takeover via artificial intelligence). Are Juno and Sean just paranoid? What is behind the bad vibes? With the hero’s dense, first-person prose covering reams of pop-culture references (song lyrics, especially), this novel offers a liberal arts milieu in which possibly fraudulent stanzas of Shelley and an antique painting hold immense importance. Imagine Umberto Eco emerging from a Shirley MacLaine retreat in Sedona, Arizona, where perhaps Dan Brown blockbusters were the only distraction. Things take an awfully long time to happen, and when they do, much verbiage results before anything is settled. Even then, a cliffhanger ending points pagodalike to the next volume, with many of the chess pieces still in play. Kelley’s ideas are intriguing, and readers will suspect the smart author is more of a grounded realist than his vision-struck, alien-believing narrator, Sean. But the engaging text is an acquired taste for adventure seekers, with the emphasis on seekers.

A charming, heavily New Age–influenced SF thriller that requires deep dives into dharma.