Some readers may not find the answer particularly comforting, and certainly there are those who will find it sacrilegious. But if you happen to share Morrow's world view that what's really sacrilegious is a God who permits evil, you'll be moved to nod your head in agreement. Not to mention chuckling at the absurdity of it all.

In an author's note, Morrow says that each book in the trilogy is more or less freestanding and you could read The Eternal Footman without being familiar with its predecessors. However, I'd recommend reading these works sequentially -- in pondering the nature of God, it helps to get the full picture.

In Towing Jehovah, a dying angel materializes before Anthony Van Horne, an oil tanker captain wracked by guilt over his culpability in an Exxon Valdez-magnitude mishap, with the announcement that God has died and his body fallen into the Atlantic. Van Horne is charged with towing the two mile long Corpus Diem to the Arctic so the remains can be preserved. Complications ensue, however, when various groups, ranging from the Vatican to a society of atheists as well as the angels themselves, seek to impose their own ideas of what should happen to the body of God. (One of my favourite episodes, which also illustrates how the irrationalities of belief need not be based in theism, is the attempted sinking of the Corpus Diem by a group of WWII air battle enactors to preserve the tenets of free-thinking by destroying any tangible proof the Creator ever existed.)

In the next volume, Blameless in Abaddon, the Corpus Diem has been thrown from its Arctic resting place by an earthquake, winding up in a Evangelical version of Disneyland called Celestial City in Orlando (there are, in reality, such Christian-themed parks, though of course they have to make do with replicas). A visit to the main attraction by a dying Martin Candle leads to his bringing suit against God in the World Court for crimes against humanity. The various theological arguments brought forth in the trial to explain suffering form the basis of Morrow's retelling of the story of Job. It's a lot funnier, and in some ways perhaps more optimistic, than the original.

It's also a darker work than Morrow's preceding novel. The events in Towing Jehovah cause the Jesuit Thomas Ockham to propose a way of life for a "Post-Theistic Age." Ockham's thesis, which inspires certain events in the concluding sequel, argues that God literally committed suicide so that humankind could become more self-reliant without getting sidetracked by the many contentious interpretations -- and resulting conflicts that often get bloody -- over what constitutes "God's will." Blameless in Abaddon, however, questions the degree to which even God has free will. Contrary to the duality of traditional Christianity which proposes a cosmic battle between the forces of Good (God) and evil (Satan), Morrow places the struggle squarely within God's psyche. Thus, God has a classic insanity defense -- there's an evil side of him that even he can't control.

In The Eternal Footman (a reference to Death from T. S. Elliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"), the body of God has now deteriorated to the point where it self-destructs, with various body parts either vaporizing or floating off into the ocean. Most significantly, the divine skull is thrown into orbit, apparently unleashing a plague in which manifestations of each individual's Death, a being called a "fetch," inflicts various pains upon its victim, from the merely annoying to the ultimately fatal.

In hopes of obtaining a reported cure for her only son, Kevin, Nora Burkhart embarks on a pilgrimage to the Mexican clinic of Dr Adrian Lucidio, a Jungian psychologist and cult-founder whose dangerous combination of ego and nuttiness provide yet another take on how good intentions go astray. Lucidio employs world-renowned sculptor Gerard Korty to create a series of graven images for his seemingly cured acolytes to worship. Independent of this, however, Korty is working on his masterpiece -- a reliquary based on Ockham's Post-Theistic Age theories that, with Burkhart's help, determines the future of the human race.

Ultimately, while it has taken God three books to go down for the final count, his motivations remains inscrutable, as this conversation with God's colon floating in the Gulf of Mexico (I warned you it gets weirder) illustrates:

    "Why do You care...?
    AT THE MOMENT, WE READILY ADMIT, YOU ARE ADDRESSING YOUR CREATOR'S EVIL SIDE, WHICH MEANS THAT YOUR QUESTION IS, ON THE SURFACE, ASTUTE. WHAT YOU FAIL TO APPRECIATE IS THAT OUR FACETS SPORT DUALITIES OF THEIR OWN. YOU MIGHT BE ADDRESSING THE EVIL SIDE OF OUR EVIL SIDE, OR YOU MIGHT BE ADDRESSING THE GOOD SIDE OF OUR EVIL SIDE-THERE'S NO WAY TO TELL...
    "So the Lucidio Clinic really exists?"
    YOU'LL FIND OUT SOON ENOUGH.
    "Do you want the clinic to endure because it works - or because it doesn't work?"
    THAT DEPENDS ON WHETHER YOU ARE ADDRESSING THE GOOD SIDE OF OUR EVIL SIDE..OR THE GOOD SIDE OF HIS EVIL SIDE.

As absurd as this conversation seems, it's really no more absurd than the central notion of an all-knowing God who makes covenants with humans that he must know will be broken, does nothing to prevent them, and then punishes people for doing what he must have known they would have done.

Ultimately, Morrow suggests that The Eternal Footman -- the fetch we all know will come for each of us -- is in many ways not only what makes us human, but actually helps define our existence in positive ways.