SOURCE: "The Bomb and Burger King," in The New York Times Book Review, May 8, 1994, p. 13.

In the following review, Peterson faults the weak characterizations in Life after God.

Imagine a sour Prufrock on Prozac, measuring out his 30-odd years in teaspoon-sized stories. This is the monotonic voice brooding over Life After God a book of stories by Douglas Coupland, the author of Generation X and Shampoo Planet. Though each of these very short tales has its own narrator, the voice never really varies: it drones where it might delve, it skims where it might seduce, it hoards where it might offer sustenance. The range of character and emotion is so slight as to be undetectable. Presented with such an unmoving feast, a reader might starve to death.

In the first story, "Little Creatures," a father tells his wondering child a few fractured fairy tales: there is Doggles, the...