Religious experience is at the heart of Asylum for Nightface, and the many references to Jesus will be uncomfortable for some readers. Brooks has a knack for targeting issues of great importance to his readership, and religion and faith are surely among them. Zimmerman says that to him finding God is simple; He is manifested everywhere and people merely need to look to see Him. Zimmerman is especially convinced of the existence of God by what he calls the "design"; to him, the natural world is too well organized to be accidental. In its individual creatures and in their relationships are the signs of God's work.

This is an old argument dating back at least to the Enlightenment when Isaac Newton and many others professed to see God's hand in how the natural world is organized, and it echoes Albert Einstein's view that by studying nature...