And God Said, Billy! - A Novel

From the New York Times bestselling author of Crazy For God... "And God Said 'Billy!' is laugh-out loud funny from page one. It's downright insightful throughout and takes readers deep into the shallow psyche of a sincere Charismatic-Evangelical whose God fails him. That failure turns out, through a hilarious series of tragic-comic reversals, to be - let's just say something close to miraculous. I love this novel." -- Brian D. McLaren, author/speaker/blogger. "Honest, humorous and sure to rankle those who believe that being human means being certain." -- Kevin Miller director of "Hellbound?" the movie. "When the family business is religion, it is especially perilous. To millions of evangelical Christians, the Schaeffer name is royal, and Frank Schaeffer is the reluctant, wayward, traitorous prince. His crime... is turning his back on Christian conservatives." The New York Times. "Frank Schaeffer exposes the insanity and the corruption of what has become a powerful and frightening force in American politics... As someone who has made redemption his work, he has, in fact, shown amazing grace." -- Jane Smiley Pulitzer Prize winner and author of A Thousand Acres. And God Said, "Billy!" is a darkly comic coming-of-age story written by the master story teller that House of Sand and Fog author Andre Dubus III hailed as the funniest American writer since Mark Twain. The story is set in the 1980s and is about Billy, a young fundamentalist Christian who feels called to go to Hollywood to make "God's movie." But everything goes off the rails when he accepts a job to direct a soft-porn slasher/exploitation film in apartheid-era South Africa. He makes this "It's a deal not a movie" picture even though he has to bust the US entertainment industry's anti-apartheid sanctions in hopes his "worldly movie" will be "used by God" as a "stepping stone" to making his own divinely sanctioned "End Times" picture. Billy loses his fundamentalist faith, his film career, his family and mo