[Deus Irae] may well be the worst book I have ever read. It struck me as something Tom Wolfe might produce if he were to crossbreed Walter M. Miller's Canticle for Leibowitz with a twisted version of Pilgrim's Progress. Deus Irae centers around a pilgrimage to find God, the God of wrath, and the pilgrim in the book encounters many portents and has many visions as he sticks to the straight and narrow: hence the resemblance to Pilgrim's Progress. Furthermore, the book describes monastic life in a period after a nuclear holocaust has left a charred and deformed world behind: hence the resemblance to Miller's Canticle for Leibowitz.

The search is for the God who could permit such devastation to occur, the Deus Irae. Thus, the story is a take-off from the Scholastics' traditional problem of evil: If God is omnipotent, then nothing can exist unless God wants...